


West - The Noose Tightens

by shaenie



Series: West [7]
Category: LoTR RPS - AU
Genre: F/M, M/M, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-10-03
Updated: 2011-09-01
Packaged: 2017-10-12 09:15:13
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 11
Words: 59,718
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/123305
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shaenie/pseuds/shaenie





	1. Returning: Lando, Cate, Yuma, July 1880

It’s deep night when Cate wearily makes her way up the back stairs to her rooms. Business has been good, which meant customers still lingering in the parlor and front bedrooms in the small hours of the morning, and a mess of cleaning-up to do and the money to be counted and various complaints about torn dress hems and borrowed bracelets to be listened to. As it is, nothing’s quite as neat or settled as Cate likes to leave it for the night, but she’s too tired to keep going herself let alone insist on anyone else staying up longer. Dominic simply took her ledger and pen out her hands and shooed the girls away and swept the take into the cash box and blew out the lamp, so she could go up to bed or sit in the dark twiddling her thumbs. She chose bed, despite the two narrow flights of stairs she’d have to climb.

She pauses on the landing, waiting for her heartbeat to settle inside the merciless lacings of her evening dress. She crosses to her door and – like a mental tick she’s powerless to control – she thinks of Lando, as she does every night in precisely this spot. For a second she sees her room, awash with lamplight and framed by the open door, and Lando sitting on the bed smiling at her with Julian’s wicked humor. She can see the gloss of his dark curls and the shine of his eyes, the crisp white linen of his shirt and the rich brocade of his vest, the dusted hems of his pants and the gleam of his boots. And as she does every night, she sets the thought of him away from her coldly and calmly. He’s gone. It’s over … whatever _it_ was. She opens the door onto a darkened room, and goes inside, and shuts the door behind her.

There’s enough moonlight spilling through the parted drapes of the window to guide her to the side table and the lamp and matches. She lights the wick and replaces the glass globe, tossing the spent match into the little white and gold china dish beside the lamp. She wanders to the window, her hands in her hair, rubbing at the tension in her scalp where her hair’s coiled and pinned. She twitches the curtains down and closed, then meanders towards the bedroom, pulling pins out as she goes and letting the long twists of her blond hair tumble down her back.

She’s on the threshold of the bedroom when she sees a movement in the dark there, a shift of deeper black in the gloom. She doesn’t cry out, though it’s the obvious thing to do, but it’s a simple skill she lost years ago. Instead she backs up rapidly, heel hooking her train out of her way as she twists and lunges for the sideboard. She yanks open the top drawer, the heavy steel-gripped revolver inside sliding forwards under the momentum. She grabs for it, already second-guessing her choice of this weapon over a smaller more ladylike gun that would be easier to retrieve without fouling on the edge of the drawer.

He'd known better than to lurk, had known that Cate was too observant, and he'd honestly meant to wait for her in her sitting room in plain sight, somewhere she couldn't mistake him, but he's spent time enough in her bedroom to be comfortable there, in the dark. The sitting room had been too stark with moonlight, too full of the uncertain shapes of furniture, and he'd retreated, finally, to the bedroom, to a simple, uncomfortable wooden chair against the wall by the window. He'd fallen asleep, sheer exhaustion doing what intent hadn't been able to do for weeks now, sitting straight up with the shotgun balanced across his knees, hands still wrapped around it. He'd barely roused at the sound of Cate moving through the other room, had just managed to set the shotgun aside (but he hadn't thought to call out to her, hadn't even considered announcing his presence), when the lamp had flared. And then he hadn't moved. Hadn't been able to bring himself to give up the element of surprise.

Just in case. Just in case it wasn't Cate, and never mind that he can hear the rustle of heavy silk, never mind that he knows the sound of her footsteps nearly as well as he'd known the sound of Billy's, once.

It is her, of course, he sees it in the instant in which she's silhouetted in the doorway, lit from behind by the lamp in the sitting room, but she's gone before he can say her name, though his mouth is open. It seems as though his throat is too unused to speech to get her name out easily, smoothly, and it occurs to him that it's been a good long while since he's actually spoken out loud at all.

He can hear her opening (the sideboard, he knows, the big gun, he's clearly scared the hell out of her) a drawer, and he's up and crossing the room, afraid, now, that saying her name will only scare her further, because he hasn't spoken to anyone in weeks, and previous to that he'd been using Ruben's rough, grating voice, and there's no telling what he bloody _sounds_ like right now. He wraps his arms around her from behind before his eyes have quite adjusted to the dazzle from the lamp (able to do it only because he knows where she is in the room and can see a slim, dark blur that's most likely her through his squinted lids), and though he hadn't meant to, he's saying, "Cate, Cate, don't." He knows it isn't a voice she recognizes by the tension in her spine, the sudden hitch of her breath, which he can hear but only barely feel -- even though he's got both arms around her, her arms pinned tight to her sides, and he can't see the gun but he doesn't doubt that she has it -- because of the corset of course, stupid bloody torture device.

And that, ridiculously, is what snaps him back to himself, almost like a slap, he can feel it happen in his head, and he'd had no idea, not even an inkling, of how much of himself he'd left in Yuma when he'd fled.

She's twisting in his arms, breathing fast and hard, but she's not screaming (thank God, but he's not surprised) and she's keeping her wits about her (also not surprised), and he says, "Cate, it's Lando, for God's sake, don't shoot me," and then lets go all at once, takes two steps back, because as long as he's holding her she'll never believe him, _can't_ believe him, because that's just how Cate is.

 _”Don’t shoot me.”_

It’s that more than his saying his name or the sound of his voice that gets through to her. Lando’s the only man alive who’d take it for granted she intended to pull the trigger. And then he lets her go, and she stumbles and catches her ribs hard against the edge of the sideboard but the shock of pain means nothing, just tightens her jaw even more. She twists, swinging the gun up to shoulder level at arm’s length, thumbing the hammer back because even if it’s him – even _though_ it’s him – her heart won’t stop pounding and her throat won’t open again until she’s seen him over the sight at the end of the barrel.

He falls back another step, hands half-raised as if in surrender and the first thing she sees – really _sees_ in the here and now – is the dirt crusted in the lines of his palms.

Cate blinks, and that’s a luxury she wouldn’t allow herself if she were really in danger. She’s no longer sighting along the revolver, though it’s still pointed at his chest; she’s just staring. She’s staring at the dull tangle of his too-long hair hanging into his face, and the scruff of black beard on his jaw, and his filthy rough-spun cattle-hand’s clothing.

Cate eases the hammer forward again, and when it snicks back into place she tips the revolver upwards and then lowers it again, letting it hang heavy in the folds of her skirts.

“Cate?” he says experimentally.

His voice sounds stiff and dry. She glances him over, more than half-expecting a bandage or bit of bloody rag tied round some limb or other, but he seems whole. She looks him in the face again. He’s thinner, when he was already whipcord lean, and there are dark shadows under his eyes and a half-healed crack in his lower lip that bespeaks desert living and short water rations.

“Lando?” Cate asks, and it’s not a trick of tone intended to convey surprise at his presence, it’s a genuine request for confirmation.

He nods, frowns, runs his fingers through his hair to get it out of his Goddamned face. They tangle in it, and he tugs them free, wincing and shaking it back instead. "Yes," he says, though of course it's not exactly true. Not yet, anyway.

His heart is still pounding heavily in his chest. It had taken everything he had, _everything_ , to look at her past the enormous bore of the pistol in her soft, white hands and not drop to the ground and roll back, into the safety of her bedroom, where his shotgun is propped up next to her bed. He remembers what it is like to trust her completely, and he knows that only a few months ago, Lando would have laughed. Raised his hands, because he isn't stupid now and hadn't been then, but he could have, would have, probably, smiled at her and laughed and teased her about being too quick of temper, promised things inane and impossible if she would not shoot him, though he would admit that he deserved it, and he could say the words and laugh and not mean them. He can almost taste the tone and timbre of potential words in his mind, feel them on his tongue, like remembering the way grains of sugar feel gritty on his tongue, or remembering the taste of rain, but he can't capture them.

Not quite.

So, no, he isn't Lando. Not exactly. Not yet.

But it's always like that when he comes back to Yuma. This is no different.

He has to believe that.

So he says it again, without the nod this time, and dismisses the look on her face, the uncertainty, something that isn't quite disbelief, but is close enough to hurt a little. Not that he blames her.

She has never seen him like this; he's been quite careful about it.

He isn't sure why he is even here, isn't sure why he had come back. He doesn't think he had meant to, but the memory of the decision (had there been one?) to come to Yuma is hazy. Lots of things are, actually.

He hasn't been sleeping. He can't, and he knows that eventually, that will drive a man mad. He knows it, and in the end, he remembers thinking about sleeping with Cate (he always sleeps better here than anywhere else, and he's not fool enough to tell himself it's the bed), remembers thinking about how it feels to _really_ sleep, and then some time had passed and the landscape had started to look familiar.

And once he'd realized where he was heading, he hadn't had the fortitude not to continue.

"Cate," he says, and then goes to push his hair out of his face again, once more tangling his fingers in it (it's filthy and tangled, not quite matted, but pretty bloody close), feeling it both gritty and greasy against the equally dirty pads of his fingers, and he snarls and just jerks it out this time, yanking though tangles, feeling the sharp sting at his scalp and not giving a damn about it. He hates that he doesn't know what to say to her, hates that he's so exhausted he can hardly think. "I need a fucking bath," he growls, and he sees her start, surprise rather than fear, he thinks, but he can't think why.

The shape of his mouth around the profanity is both novel and unexpected. Cate tries to make sense of the weighty feeling of calm gathering in her chest. Rationally, this forbidding new face should make her fear him more, not less. There’s a tiny tense watchful something that Cate feels around every man she knows except for Dominic and – now – Lando.

Cate sets the revolver down on the sideboard, the weight of the weapon thunking solidly on the wood. She moves to him, and he doesn’t move away but watches her with shifting shining eyes.

“I’m not sure a bath is going to do it,” she says. “I may have to have you scraped with the dull side of a knife.”

She reaches out, plucking at a fold of his shirt –sleeve, feeling how the cloth’s turned stiff with dried sweat and embedded dust. And then, very deliberately, she takes his wrist in both her hands and lifts it and turns it. She wipes her fingertips firmly across his skin and the dirt coalesces into little black grains, exposing a strip of darkly tanned skin underneath. She can feel his pulse ticking in the thinly corded veins.

“It’s too late to start boiling coppers for a real bathtub,” she says matter-of-factly. “But come down to the kitchen. I can heat enough water for you to strip and wash in the tub down there at least. You can eat while we wait – you are hungry, aren’t you? You look hungry.”

He looks like a starved dog.

Cate moves away again. She gathers the loose stream of her hair in both hands and coils it haphazardly at the back of her neck, holding it in place while she rifles drawers and bureau dishes for a hair-stick which she deftly threads into place. It’s precarious, but it’ll hold well enough to keep her hair out of her way.

She’s not stupid. He isn’t _safe_. He’s still the man who’s killed for her sake, who’s killed for other reasons too she suspects. He’s still the nearest thing she has to a protector and a provider in this world. But she knows where his breaks are now, and the knowledge fills her with fierce tenderness.

He ignores the urge to retreat to the bedroom, the need to feel the shotgun in his hands, and follows her back as she turns and moves down the stairs. Several strands of her pale hair have escaped from the knot already, and trail in gentle waves down her back. His fingers twitch with the urge to touch it. He remembers the feel of it, heavy, dense silk. His own hair is coarse, wiry, even when it's clean (which it isn't, not by a long shot, and now that he's thinking about the potential for being clean, he itches, his scalp and his skin, and he twists his back and shoulders, feeling his skin scrape along the inside of his stiff shirt).

They don't speak while she opens cupboards and he smells roast poultry, something laden with herbs, and sharp cheese and then she's setting a plate in front of him. His belly clenches painfully, and his mouth is suddenly flooded with spit. When he picks up his fork, his fingers shake for an instant before he curls them hard enough around the handle to turn his knuckles grey.

"Eat," she says, clipped and business-like, but her eyes are soft. She sets a glass of cool water at his elbow, and he can smell it.

"Thank you," he says, and catches her nod out of the corner of his eye, but his attention is fixed on his plate, on the food. He hears her moving around, heating water -- and he should offer to lift those, they aren't exactly light -- but instead he eats, drinks (the water is clean and good, and he drains the glass in several long gulps, hardly noticing when she refills it a few moments later), eats more, listens to the swish of her dress and her silence as she goes about her task, and wonders if she knows he can't talk now, that he's dried up and empty like his weeks on the road had been, and that's why she doesn't try to talk to him.

Or maybe she doesn't have anything to say to him anymore.

God knows he would deserve it, if that were so.

He barely tastes anything, though he suspects the food is good, and his plate is empty in less than three minutes. She glances over at him -- he meets her eyes, but he's too tired to really try and break down her layers and decipher what he sees there -- brows arched, and he shakes his head, setting the plate away. "Thank you," he says again, and she nods.

Cate’s never been any kind of housewife, has never been able to make any kind of a hand at feeding and taking care of a man. Adrian made it perfectly clear to her that any value she had lay between her legs, and few men have ever tried to persuade her to the contrary.

It’s ironic really: what little nursing she’s ever done she’s done for Lando, his are the only clothes she’s ever toiled awkwardly over with needle and thread trying to fix a single loose button, and the only floor she’s ever knelt to scrub –

\- Cate’s thoughts skitter away from that.

She tucks a towel around her waist and ties her train up and sets about putting food on a plate for him. She draws cool water out of the stone cistern by the door, and her hands feel sure and skillful. He’s silent, eating with the quick intent movements of a starving man.

Cate stirs the fire up and fills the cauldron and the kettle. She comes back to the table and takes his empty glass. He doesn’t so much as glance at her when she does, nor when she sets the refilled vessel down again.

The silence of the house and the kitchen and the man soak into Cate’s bones like balm on a wound she didn’t know she had. In the past, she’d sit down with him and he’d talk aimlessly and amusingly. She liked it, those bright words, reassurances that whatever he was in truth he’d show her only the smooth hard surface he called Julien.

Now, after four months of nothing, even his silence is enough to fill the spaces. She looks over at him, and he’s looking back at her. He shakes his head, pushing his empty plate away.

“Thank you,” he says, and Cate knows it isn’t for the food or the shelter or even the heating water. She nods, just accepting it without remark.

She reaches up to the mantle and feels around until she finds Dominic’s tobacco pouch and papers tucked out of sight. She lifts them down and brings them over to the table, together with a match. She sets them down, and turns away again without quite looking him in the eye. There’s no need, any more than there’s a need for words. They’re beyond that now.

Cate moves smoothly around the kitchen, gathering up some more towels, a cake of soap, and a stiff-bristle brush they use for taking the street dirt off their hems. There’s a pile of sheets folded on a stool and she spreads one out on the floor, bending laboriously in her tight lacing. She wrestles the biggest wash-tub off its peg and eases it down, taking care not to clatter it on the floorboards. She trusts anyone in the house to protect Julien; she’d rather they didn’t see this gaunt and filthy stranger though.

She lifts and empties the two buckets of cold water left standing for the morning into the tub. She wraps the kettle handle in a towel and lifts it off the fire and empties it in too. The cauldron’s more daunting: it’s heavy and almost simmering, and she’s laced to a fair-thee-well in a dress with a French bustle, but she gets the rim of the cauldron braced against the edge of the tub and transfers the contents without doing worse than splashing the floor and the front of her skirts.

Four months ago (and probably four days from now it'll be the same), he'd have offered to help, demanded that she let him help, in fact. Tonight he watches her fill the tub, and her effort exhausts him, just watching it. He wants to put his head down on the counter and hook his boot heels over the crosspieces of the stool he's sitting on and just go to sleep. He's done it before, and his right arm will ache for it, but he's slept worse places, too. At the very least, it will relieve him of the feeling that he should be thinking right now, should be trying to talk to her (and he stretches out a hand and hooks the tobacco pouch -- Dom's, he recognizes it, and his guts clench and he closes his eyes tightly, unable to think how to deal with Dominic just now -- over to him, rolling a smoke to occupy his hands and maybe his fuzzy brain, if he's lucky), explain something to Cate that he's never even been able to explain to himself.

That he'd had no choice, that he _has_ no choice, as far as Bills is concerned. That he hadn't been abandoning _her_. That he had been running for his life, and for more than his life.

 _Stupid bloody bastard_ , he thinks, and rests his elbow on the table and his forehead in his palm. He tucks the cigarette into the corner of his mouth, but doesn't light it. _She doesn't need to know, has never wanted to know._

Which is true. She's too smart to want to know the details. She'd make a good enforcer herself, he's pretty sure. She practically lives by their (his) rules already ( _"...ask me no questions and I'll tell you no lies, the guns are 'neath the floorboards, the corpses drawing flies,"_ he remembers singing with Broken Dan and those twins out of Laredo, Jack -- Jack-be-nimble, they'd laughed, but he's dead now, and no longer very nimble -- and Lyndon, all four of them half drunk on corn whiskey the twins had got from somewhere, just after El Paso, this was, and the crows had been thick and noisy outside, and that night Lando had woke up screaming and Lyndon had nearly fucking shot him). She understands better than anyone he's ever met that the less you know about some things, the better off you are. He pinches the lone sulfur matchstick on the countertop between his fingers, flicks it with his thumbnail, and watches it flare. He prefers the acrid smell of it to the stink of himself (which he can only smell right now, he guesses, because he's surrounded by other smells, clean ones). He lets it burn for several seconds, and then tilts his head and dips the end of the cigarette into the fire, sucking smoke into his lungs. It goes right to his head -- he hasn't had one in a while -- and he closes his eyes for a long moment, fighting for steadiness, exhaling through his nose.

Cate is the only _woman_ he's ever met who doesn't think that the things he keeps from her make him _more_ dangerous for her. He wonders if he's ever told her that he appreciates the hell out of that. He supposes he'll have to do that sometime.

"Lando?" she says, and his eyes snap open as he twitches hard, and the flimsy, irregular cylinder of paper and leaf snaps in half between his fingers, sending the bright, hot coal on the end into his lap and leaving nothing but a twist of paper in his fingers. He's up and brushing at his crotch, holding out one hand to stop her (she'd started forward to help him, but he doesn't want her touching him like this, she shouldn't have to touch him right now) from approaching. He slaps the burning embers off of his trousers and puts his boot on them quickly.

"Sorry, dammit," he mutters, and his hand is in his hair again, tangling, before he can think to stop it.

“Shh,” Cate breathes, and there’s a smile – an actual smile – curling her mouth because he’s exhausted and jumpy and he smells like something might have crawled into his clothes to die. And he’s here. When Cate runs she runs far and fast and doesn’t ever ever go back. She can only imagine what it must have taken in courage – and longing – for him to circle back to Yuma at all. Part of her – the part that’s been mourning him – wants to tell him so. But the greater part knows that words can’t do justice to anything between them now.

They’ve always communicated more by the spaces between what they say, the things they leave unsaid. Before, it was because he didn’t want to tell her and she didn’t want to hear. Now … now she already knows. Not reasons, not details, but she knows Boyd’s glass green eyes and the way the curtain waved through the open window of her room and the way Lando left nothing _nothing_ behind but a broken collar stud that had fallen down the back of the bureau and a void that settled in the pit of her stomach and made her want to run too, so badly that she's packed her bag more than once in the last seventeen weeks. She knows enough that there’s no reason for him to try to tell her more.

Lando’s trying to unhook the fingers he so thoughtlessly dug into the front of his hair, which he succeeds in doing largely by brute force, leaving several long dark strands hanging from his cuff button.

“You have to wash,” Cate says gently. “At least the top three layers of dirt. You’re _not_ getting into my bed like that.”

She turns away, affording him privacy for his emotions, since there’s scarcely an inch of him she hasn’t already seen stripped bare on one occasion or another.

“Do you want me to have those clothes washed or just burnt?” she chides, pulling drawers open until she finds the pair of scissors and a comb left behind from Liv’s ad hoc attempts at barbering Dominic a few days earlier. “And I’ll do what I can with your hair, but I may have to just shear you like a lamb that’s been in a burr patch.”

He pauses, shirt half unbuttoned, and he can feel the smile almost twitching at his lips, just barely lifting one corner. It feels damned good, even if it is only a twitch, even if she doesn't see it, just to find that it's possible. "I'd sooner cut off my arm," he says, and for a moment he thinks he understands how odd it must be, for her.

He hears words that definitely belong to Julien La Fleur, in Lando Bloom's voice, while he stands here in Ruben del Acero's clothes and dirt and stink.

It's more than strange, _he_ is more than merely strange; he's a stranger. And he always will be, no matter how long she knows him, no matter how close they sleep at night, no matter how familiar she is with the shape of his smile or the way it feels for their bare limbs to wind together in the dead of the night, the only time that they don't pull away from one another's honest touch, although they don't push closer, either. No matter how much heat lies between them, mostly untapped and ignored, and no matter how much love binds them together, he is a stranger.

A permanent stranger.

He doesn't know how she stands it.

But he had, once, hadn't he? Billy is _the_ permanent stranger, the original. Everything Lando is, everything he's become, can be traced back to that time, those years, that man.

She turns, just her head, to look at him from over her shoulder, the line of her jaw soft and smooth, her lips a sweet curl, a gentle smirk, and she is beautiful, and he doesn't deserve her.

"Cate," he breathes, and shakes his head. And there's so much, but there's no need to say it. He can see it in her eyes. So instead, he says, "You are _not_ cutting my hair." And the smile is easier this time, more solid, and he shucks his shirt, dropping it to the floor and kicking it away. "Burn them, by all means. The sooner the better."

Cate snips at the air threateningly, but she’s smirking, and once his mouth curls in answer she sets the scissors and comb down again.

She doesn’t quite turn away while he strips, but she manages to find little things to fuss over, putting away the food she’d taken out and washing his plate and sweeping up the tobacco shreds from the table, that keep her from looking in his direction. When she hears the liquid whisper of him immersing himself in the tub, she takes up the low stool from under the table and sets it next to the tub, behind his back. She hitches her bustle up and sits down. She’s split the soap cake into two pieces, and she passes him one over the curve of his bare shoulder.

“Here, you do the front and I’ll do the back or we’ll be here until breakfast time,” she says dryly.

Lando snorts, but he doesn’t suggest they swap assignments, which is an omission Julien would never make.

Cate scrubs some of the soap onto the bristle-brush and then scrubs the brush across his shoulder blades. There’s a sharp splash as Lando loses his own bit of soap and he moans shamelessly.

“Oh holy – that’s good.”

“Focus,” Cate says severely, batting him with the wooden side of the brush. “I swear, you brought most of Arizona with you.”

He’s a bizarre patchwork of tan-lines, darkest around his wrists, lighter at the elbows, lighter again at the shoulders, and only faintly colored across his back. Cate smiles to herself. He’s a bizarre patchwork of personalities too, so there’s a kind of rightness to that.

They work in silence for a while, just the splash of water against the side of the tub and the rasp of the brush on his skin and the occasional sniffle as he wipes a droplet from his nose or chin. She scrubs out his hair as best she can and then, despite his protests, she cuts out the snarls she can’t comb out. His hair’s thick and wavy enough that the handful she removes makes no discernable difference. She amuses herself arranging his damp curls on his forehead in a rather dashing fashion she suspects Julien might begin to affect if Lando doesn’t take himself to a real barber tomorrow.

“You’ll do,” she says grudgingly. “I’ll have the big bathtub filled tomorrow – today – and you can soak the rest out then.”

She stands up, wincing at the crick in her neck. She’s been laced up for far too long, her ribs are aching. She hands him the top most towel from the pile.

“Dry off, I’m going to get rid of these clothes. Go up when you’re ready, don’t wait for me.”

She’s beyond tired now, literally beyond it into tomorrow’s – today’s – wakefulness. She’s almost tempted to just change her dress and start in on today, but she suspects he won’t settle until she’s with him.

He catches her wrist as she turns away; she swings back around without resistance, her eyes merely curious, fearless.

"Tomorrow," he says, and loosens his grip deliberately, so she could pull her slim wrist out of his grip is she likes. He can feel the slight bump of her wrist bone under his thumb, and without really meaning to, he brushes his thumb across it twice. "Just bring them upstairs, sunshine, just... let it go until tomorrow. They aren't going anywhere."

It's ridiculous, he knows. She's smart to want to do it now, at night, before anyone can see. But he needs her now, and she looks tired, and there's nothing he wants more than he wants to fall asleep with her hair tickling his cheek.

She glances at the pile of clothing, glances at his face, and then nods. "Let me just get..." she says, and then scoops them up (he sees her nose wrinkle, and he smiles) quickly, and drops them into one of the empty water buckets. He tugs it out of her hand -- the least he can do is carry his own filthy clothes -- and she glances at the tub of equally filthy water.

He can see her frowning, thinking, and he murmurs, "Tomorrow, it doesn't matter, I'm not being chased, not this time, not yet," which is mostly true, he isn't being actively followed to the best of his knowledge (though he knows that he's always being sought, in some form or another). There will be questions in the morning, for Cate, but they'll be answered easily enough, once he shaves, once he sleeps, once he can at least achieve the appearance Julien. "Tomorrow," he repeats, and she nods.

She precedes him up the narrow stairway, and if she had to fight her own tiredness the last time she made this trip – a little less than an hour ago – she’s swaying on her feet now. More than once she has to put her hand out to steady herself against the wall. Lando makes small wordless noises of questioning concern, but he’s hampered by the bucket he’s carrying and the narrowness of the stairwell and he can’t actually take hold of her to support her.

When Cate emerges on the upper landing outside her door, she has the same habitual mental flash on him that’s both plagued and comforted her for so many weeks. But this time she turns her head sharply, eyes shining with something more than satisfaction, to see him watching her in the dimness.

She turns back, opening the door of her rooms for the second time tonight. She goes to the lamp and turns the flame up a little more, then digs both hands into her hair and lets it down while he closes the door and sets the bucket down in the corner.

Cate goes through to the bedroom, pulling open the row of tiny buttons down the front of her bodice. She glances at the window, and there’s a crack of violet paleness showing between the not-quite closed drapes. It’ll be dawn soon.

Cate strips off the upper part of her gown and tugs at the strings of her petticoat. When everything gives way and folds into a heap around her knees she just steps out, heeling her evening slippers off as she does do. The dress will probably never recover from the water splashes, but right now she feels like she’d never put it on again anyway so she doesn’t care.

Getting out of her corset is suddenly urgent, as if she can’t stand one more shallow breath, as if her ribs will crack if she can’t expand them properly. She yanks at the bow tied in the laces and unwraps the spare length from around her waist and then tries to unhook at the front, but she’s constricted so tightly and she’s so incapable of making the effort needed to pull herself in enough to ease the pressure on the hooks that she can’t get any leverage. With a little noise of frustration she cranes both hands into the small of her back to try to pull the laces a little looser.

Lando brushes her hands away without speaking and there’s a second of even more pressure as he pries his fingers between the criss-crossed cords and then – blessed relief – he yanks hard enough to pull the center lacing through the eyelets and she has a precious inch or two of space. He works deftly along her spine, up and down, pulling more cord loose.

“That’s fine,” Cate gasps, getting hold of the corset fronts and now she can part the hooks from the studs and the whole thing splits like an oyster shell and she actually staggers, laughing, as the first free breath sobs into her aching lungs.

She staggers a bit, a slight sideways tilt, and he slides an arm around her waist to steady her. As tired as he is, she still weighs nearly nothing (especially without the yards of fabric she'd been wearing), and it's easy enough to wrestle the corset out from around her (she doesn't actually have a grip on it anyway, just on the front edges), peel it away from her body and toss it into the seat of an upholstered chair, though he can't muster up enough energy to engage in his usual monologue on the stupidity and uselessness of such undergarments (or listen to her refute each of his points with amused indulgence, as though his dislike of them is similar to the sulking of a spoiled child who doesn't want to bother with the wrapping to get to the gift inside).

For a moment, she's curved warmly against his side, the side of her thigh against the front of his and the curve of her hip pressed to his hipbone, like they're puzzles pieces that aren't quite aligned correctly. As always, he's tempted to align her, turn her so that she's fitted against him from lips to ankles, front to front. He knows, by this time, that they'd fit. She's tall for a woman, even, so it'd be all the more perfect, an even better fit.

As always, he doesn't do it. When she's got her breath and her balance, which she indicates by a slight tensing, not quite pulling away from him (he thinks it's because she's worried _he_ will collapse without _her_ support) but letting him know that she's ready to, he lets her go.

It's almost funny that, even in the state he's in, even with the simple, inescapable pull of his own exhaustion, he's very aware of her nearby, mostly undressed (even if she is still covered nearly from head to foot by underclothes) and smelling so bloody good. He sinks down onto the edge of the bed (his side of her bed, which is the side furthest from the door, of course, and also the side closest to the window) and rubs at his face.

Undressing won't be anywhere near the event for him as it is for her since he's wearing nothing but a towel anyhow, and he'll get up in a moment and rummage in his saddlebags (dirtier and a damn sight lighter than they usually are when he visits Yuma, no gifts this time, he'll have to shop in town, but it'll be a few days, he needs time to make some money at the tables) for some drawers, but for the moment he just sits and listens to her moving around (brushing her hair out, he thinks, but he's so tired that he could be wrong) and breathes in the calm that being with her provides.

"I think I'll be staying a while," he says, which is true, but he's not sure why he's saying it, whether it's to reassure her or maybe to make up for the way he'd left (even though they both know that he can't _know_ how long he'll stay, not really).

Cate pulls a brush haphazardly through her hair a few times and makes a rough braid over one shoulder, since not to do so is to lay up stores of trouble in the morning when she tries to untangle her almost waist-length hair. If she ever does find a fall that’ll match, she’s going to have the wretched thing cut off at her shoulders.

She opens the top drawer of her bureau to retrieve a nightgown. If he wasn’t here, she’d sleep in her chemise, which has a low neck and no sleeves in order to accommodate an evening gown, and barely reaches her shins. The thought of swathing herself in a high-collared long-sleeved ankle-length nightgown is almost unbearable. She yanks the garment out of its folds resentfully, and glances at him over her shoulder.

He sitting on the far side of the bed, his shoulders slumped and his head bowed. His hair, still damp from the bath, is curling up in shiny ringlets at the nape of his neck.

"I think I'll be staying a while."

Cate hesitates at that. It’s not exactly a lie, she knows, but more in the nature of a statement of aspiration rather than intent. There’ve always been enough things she could name or guess at that have the power to send him packing at an hour’s notice, and now she knows one that can spur him to flight even more suddenly – Boyd.

Cate shoves the nightgown back into its drawer and comes over to the bed. She sits down with her back to his. There’s a slight shift of weight as he turns to look at her over his shoulder, but Cate stares dully ahead as she bends to strip her stockings off. Automatically she runs the pale silk through her hands to check for holes, but then she drops them and her garters on the rug without actually noticing whether they’re in need of repair.

The hell with it, she thinks. She’ll keep her drawers on and it’s not as if their mutual restraint has been dependent on four yards of pin tucked cambric. She trusts him to sleep in her bed with her; she’ll trust him to overlook her bare arms and collarbones for once.

She turns over, swinging her bare feet up onto the bed.

He feels the bed shift under her weight as she climbs into it. He stands quickly, and his mind is racing along at a merry clip while his body just stands there, brain busily employed with the task of reconciling her lack of bedclothes, her clear decision just to sleep in her underthings, all soft, thin cotton and bare limbs while the rest of him does nothing at all, unmoving, not taking the two steps to his saddlebags where his own drawers currently reside.

She's never done that before (although once, a long time ago, almost the beginning, he'd woke completely naked and found her sleeping next to him, but on top of the covers, in nothing but her underthings; they had been stained with blood that had seeped through her gown that time, just the hem, but there had been dried blood on her knees, too, and that simple fact -- and the pain he'd been in at the time -- had obliterated any chance of it having been erotic), and he balks mentally at understanding her reasoning now.

It's not that he doesn't get it. It's that he doesn't want to.

He tugs the towel out from around him and leaves it in a damp pile on the floor, and crosses the distance to his saddlebags. There isn't much in them, so it doesn't take him long to locate a pair of (clean, thankfully, all of the clothing in his bags is clean because he hasn't worn any of it, hadn't changed clothes for more days together than he wants to recall) drawers. They're rough, even against his rough fingertips. Not Julien's things, but Ruben's.

He's managed to lose all of Julien's things (again), or at least all of them that don't overlap. And he hadn't left anything here, last time, to take care of his lack. Damn.

He slides them on anyhow, as they're all he's got. He'll deal with re-outfitting Julien tomorrow.

He slides into bed silently, and whether he likes it or not, the understanding is there. The suspicion becomes certainty when he reaches for her, and she slides into his arms, all softness and warmth against his side, her cheek on his chest, her fingers linked with his atop his belly.

He knows Cate, and he supposes this shouldn't surprise him. She's exactly the kind of person that can only really trust someone whose boundaries she clearly understands, whose breaking point she knows. He doesn't know why it bothers him so much, knowing now that she had never fully trusted him, that somehow his fear (terror, more like, blind and brainless panic) has made him more... human, maybe, or more real, at least to her.

Some small, ugly part of him wants to prove her wrong. He is no different, now, than he had been six months ago. He could do it easily enough, could just shift his weight and roll on top of her, slide his hands beneath the flimsy fabric of her chemise and prove to her that he's no more trustworthy now than he had been before.

He doesn't, of course. He never has and he never will, because he may not be trustworthy (not anymore, not for years now), but he _wants_ to be. For her.

For everyone in Yuma, really, but mostly for her.

That hasn't changed.

So he curls his fingers into the fine hairs at the nape of her neck instead, leaves his other hand linked with hers, and listens to her breathe.


	2. Near Dawn: Lando, Sean, Yuma, August 1880

Southern Arizona in August is intolerable. Even at this time of night -- which might more accurately be called very early morning, though it's still an hour or more until daylight -- Lando is baking, his shirt damp with sweat. He's got his sleeves rolled up past his forearms (something Julien would never do anywhere anyone might see him) and his feet are bare on the worn-smooth boards of the porch. The sky is so deeply pocked with glittery stars that it looks like handfuls of salt strewn across black satin, and the steady drone of night insects -- crickets, mostly -- is comforting rather than annoying. Earlier there had been coyotes as well, but Lando supposes all good scavengers -- even of the nocturnal variety -- have taken to their beds, this close to dawn.

 _'Cept one_ , he thinks, amused.

He can't sleep, which in itself isn't that great a surprise. Dom puts out a lot of heat when he sleeps (among other times), and his bed is miniscule as compared to Cate's, nowhere near big enough for two full grown men, especially when it's so hot that skin on skin contact is inconceivable. Dom murmured sleepily when Lando rose, but didn't wake. Lando supposes Dom is used to him leaving in the middle of the night. After all this time, Lando is still unwilling to sleep deeply, and possibly dream, when he is with Dominic

Lando left the money on the bedtable, as he always does.

There's a double swing on one side of the porch, and Lando takes advantage of his present singleness to stretch his legs out across the seat. There is no sign of a breeze, which makes the night insufferable, but makes it easy to roll a smoke from the pouch of leaves and papers that he hardly uses while in Yuma, but which he secretly prefers to Julien's perfect cylinders, purchased at great cost, already rolled. His fingers remember how, no matter how long he goes without doing it; another of the things he'd learned as a boy and retained as a man, whether he likes it or not, imprinted in mind and muscle and skin beyond his ability to erase.

There are, he knows, many of these things.

He remembers how to flick a match lit with his thumb as well, and he inhales deeply on his smoke, pleased with the flavor of it, sweeter and less dry than the fancy ones he's used to of late.

He is about halfway through his smoke when he feels an odd tickle at the back of his neck, the twinge of something not quite right, and stands. After a moment, he becomes consciously aware of how still the night has become. The crickets have gone quiet, those nearby anyhow, though he can still hear them distantly, singing away the night.

He eases a hand down to one of the knives at his waist, but doesn't draw it.

"Come out, come out," he says, thick with Julien's accent, but sing-songing something from _Lando's_ childhood, "wherever you are."

Sean’s been walking, head down and hands deep in the pockets of his duster, not even thinking about where he’s going as long as he’s putting some distance between himself and the house where Hugo’s finally fitfully sleeping. It’s only when he hears Julien’s mocking challenge that he halts and his head comes up with a jerk. Julien, head cocked to one side in an attitude of attention, is standing on the side porch of Cate’s house with his back to Sean and one hand on his belt in an unmistakable gesture toward a weapon.

Sean stays frozen where he is. Pretty bloody ironic if he gets killed just because he’s spooked Cate’s fella, especially since Sean’s developed a bit of a soft spot for the pair of them.

“Julien,” Sean says evenly and clearly, drawing his hands out of his pockets as he does so. He thinks about going for his guns, but fuck it; he’s not going to kill the kid anyway.

Julien twists. _Bloody hell_ , Sean thinks, because the speed and certainty of the motion puts him in mind of a striking snake. The hand on Julien's belt never moves, though, as if his brain’s processed the sound of Sean’s voice and recognized it even as his body instinctively turns to face the non-existent threat.

“It’s me, Sean,” Sean says, even though it’s clear Julien already knows it.

Sean comes forward slowly. As he gets a better look at Julien, Sean’s frown furrows even deeper. The kid’s uncharacteristically disheveled looking, as indeed anyone has the right to be at four in the morning with the air steaming thick and still. But it’s more than the tousled hair and crumpled shirt and bare feet. It’s his expression. There’s something too sharp and raw in his face.

“Julien?” Sean says again when he’s at the bottom of the porch steps. It’s only then he realizes he’s never addressed the lad as anything other than ‘Mister La Fleur’ before tonight

"Why, Sheriff," Lando says, and he's always a little disturbed at how _easy_ it is to slide into Julien, like a favorite set of clothes, how both wit and accent are practically automatic, how the smile on his face is set a certain way, his eyes reflecting a lazy sort of sardonic humor, when his heart is still beating rapidly in his chest like the world's smallest snare drum and his right hand still wants to curl around the hilt of one of the knives at his waist. He's worked hard for this ease, has bled for it more than once, but still... it sometimes unsettles him. "I was not even aware you remembered my first name."

He grins and bows slightly in Sean Bean's direction (Bean's hands are spread at his sides, each a good foot from his body, and there is a deep furrow between his brows; Lando thinks it's a pretty good bet that he saw something that surprised him just now, but that might be all right, as by now Sean Bean has likely heard some of the stories, so a little proof that he's more than just a harmless dandy probably won't hurt anything), tilting his head and feigning an expression of astonishment. "Sheriff, I don't mean to tell you your business, but perhaps you had not noticed the heat?"

He gestures flamboyantly, indicating Sean's duster from collar to hem, and arches both eyebrows. "As dashing as you look in your frontier duster -- and you most certainly _do_ look dashing, very rugged and manly--" he assures earnestly, and winks when Sean snorts at him, "--I must beg you, for the sake of we who are not so hardy, take off your _coat_ , man, before you boil in your own skin!"

Sean comes up the steps onto the porch and reaches out toward Julien, slowly enough that Julien has time to draw away a little and then control the motion, his face setting in almost mask-like calm. Sean puts his hand on Julien’s wrist just long enough for Julien to feel the faint chill of Sean’s fingers. Julien’s head comes up sharply and he looks keenly into Sean’s face, but Sean doesn’t say anything, just shrugs and moves past him toward the swing seat. What can he say, anyway? How can he explain that Hugo’s demons put ice in his bones, that he won’t feel anything but cold until he sees daylight again? Besides, Sean’s coat is only a thin cotton protection against the dust; Julien’s being purposefully vexing, showing off how quickly he’s recovered his composure, dancing verbal circles around Sean.

Sean stifles the impulse to punch the lanky young fucker right in the face, and see how the ladies like his looks after that.

Sean braces one boot-heel against the porch-deck and sets the swing swaying slightly. He feels a strange desire to say something to Julien, some words of wisdom he can impart to the younger man that might ward off some of the worst excesses of youth and stupidity. The trouble is, Sean’s not sure he’s actually learnt anything much worth passing on. Julien, for all his foppish manners and insistent teasing, is no worse a fool than he should be at twenty-something. God knows, he’s got sense enough to keep coming back to the same woman, so maybe it’s him should be imparting some wisdom to Sean. Of course, by all accounts it’s the entire houseful of women he comes back to. Sean smirks in the dark. Yeah, maybe if he’d married a whole whorehouse he’d have managed to be a faithful husband.

Chuckling to himself, he pats his pockets and glances around him absently, then spots the tobacco pouch and papers on the other end of the seat.

“I’ve left mine behind,” he says, jerking his chin to indicate what he means. “Those yours?”

"Oui, feel free," Lando says, and takes advantage of Sean's attention to rolling his smoke -- broad, sure hands, quick motions, but not any more or less than any other fellow who has been rolling his own for a while -- to really give him a looking over.

He's pale under his weathered complexion; the lines in his face are even more deeply etched than normal, and there is something around his eyes that hasn't been there on the other occasions Lando has encountered him. He looks... haunted. Yes. That is exactly the word.

He turns and props himself against the railing. "You look like a man with a fantôme riding his coat tails, Monsieur," he says, rolling out the French word deliberately. Sean looks at him quizzically, cigarette dangling from the corner of his lip, and Lando makes a broad gesture with both hands, a grasping gesture, as though he can't capture the word. "Espirit, revenant." He shakes his head. "Ghost."

Sean's eyebrows arch for an instant, and then furrow down, a deep, deep frown, albeit one that doesn't touch his lips. His eyes, though... that something in his eyes, that bleak and pained _something_ is very stark and very present for a moment, before Sean blinks and shifts and looks away, casting his gaze out into the street, unfocused.

"Toutes mes excuses, Sheriff. I overstep." And for a wonder, he means it. He actually likes Sean -- as much as he can like someone who may, some day, be forced by circumstances to hang him -- reasonably well, respects him as a decent man. But still.

He can't quite stop himself from studying him, the slight clench of his jaw, the lines in his brow, because the fact is, he may one day look at Sheriff Sean Bean from the wrong side of the iron currently holstered at his hip, and he can't afford to disregard anything he can pick up between now and then.

Sean helps himself to Julien’s sulfur matches, and lights the cigarette between his lips. The first hit of smoke in his lungs winds tendrils of sweet warmth through him, and his body lets go some small increment of the tension it’s holding.

“Good,” he says, in reference to the tobacco, and leans forward to rest his elbows on his thighs, hands hanging between his knees.

Sean can feel Julien’s eyes on him, and he makes a conscious decision not to look up, not to confront his gaze. Let the kid wring whatever he can out of Sean’s weary posture, out of the stiffness he can feel knotting the muscles of his face and tightening his shoulders. Sean looks down and, not for the first time, he considers how his hands, weathered and beginning to age-freckle very slightly on their backs, have become his father’s hands. He even holds his cigarette cupped by his palm and curled fingers in precisely the same gesture. Sean shakes his head, and lifts his chin to look at the sky low over the horizon.

The stars are so bright that they seem to be hanging in a dense curtain at the far end of the street. Sean feels a little rush of vertigo, as if he’s falling into the black and brilliant spangle. The moon’s already set, and it’s still dense dark, and the faint sheen of blue-white brightness on everything is starlight.

“The stars are supposed be look a bit different here,” Sean says into the nothing. “From in Europe, I mean. I don’t know though. I don’t think I ever bloody looked at them until I came out here. Couldn’t see them in the cities anyway. Couldn’t even really see the sky during the day, with the smoke from the factories, y’know. It’s a different world out here.”

"It is, indeed," Lando agrees softly, though he barely recalls England, kaleidoscope images mostly, the fuzzy-edged memories of a very small child. "The wine country in France has similar skies, though, vast and black. The vineyards cover miles, and you can lose yourself in the rows. As a child, my grandfather taught me to use the stars to find my way back to our home."

They are lies, of course, but they are lies he's spoken so many times that they feel old and creased into soft folds, almost indistinguishable from truth at this point. Sometimes Lando can almost see the face of his imaginary French grandfather in his mind (he does not remember his real grandparents), seamed and kindly, and with shocking white hair in the same curls as Julien's. He smiles slightly at the fancy, but it doesn't stop him from feeling a bit wistful.

"They are not so different. Only in aspect, as though they've all been slightly turned." He takes the tobacco pouch from the seat beside Sean, and rolls himself another smoke. "I've used these stars to find my way home, as well. In that way, I suppose they are as constant as anything else."

Sean, still looking off into the distance, smiles and the stretch around his mouth feels good, feels as though it’s taking away some of the stiffness.

“Find yer way by the stars, eh?” he says. “When I was a kid I learnt to find my way by the look o’ the houses on the street corners, the bit o’ broken gutter where I should take the next turning, the alleyways that went straight instead of curving around like the streets did … ”

He rubs out his cigarette butt on his boot-sole and tosses it away into the street. He looks over at Julien.

“Home,” he says, thinking of Julien’s last remark. “Is that what this is, then, home?”

He tips his head slightly, as if indicating the porch under them, the house behind them. But before Julien has a chance to do anything with the question, Sean shakes his head, declining any admissions from Julien that Sean suspects will be either unwilling or untrue or both.

“I’d have done the same at your age given half a chance,” Sean smirks. “Set up home in a brothel I mean. Bloody heck, if God wants yeh to pick one woman, what the bloody hell’d he go and make all the rest of them for?”

"It does have its advantages," Lando agrees, resisting the urge to snort softly at the thick, edged profanity from Sean's mouth. "Though I expect God made 'the rest of them' to cut down on the number of fistfights, Monsieur. Imagine how we would be, we randy creatures, should there be but one woman to share amongst us."

Sean glances sideways at him, not quite smirking, and Lando arches a brow and gives him one of Julien's most roguish smiles, complete with twinkling eyes. "No, I believe I prefer it this way. I may come to a time when I wish to share what remain of my years with a single person -- there was even a time in the past when I thought so, but I was, as young people often are, quite foolish -- but not yet. Just now, I find my circumstances to be eminently suitable."

Sean is outright smiling now, and it makes him look younger. He's a handsome man -- _just ask Dominic_ , Lando thinks, amused -- but the smile does wonders for his face, makes him look both younger and less stern, less worn.

 _I was, as young people often are, quite foolish._

Sean’s expending considerable effort not to laugh outright at Julien, and yet there’s a turn of something wistful way down inside too. Maybe the wisdom he should be imparting is that there’s no fool like an old fool. Sean leans back in the swing seat, idling it back and forth very slowly with one foot.

It occurs to him that there’s something about Cate that reminds him of Susannah. Not looks – there’s the quick resemblance of coloring, though Susannah’s eyes were more definitely green than Cate’s, and Susannah wasn’t quite so blond - but Cate’s a thousand times more beautiful than Susannah was. But something in their manner, cool and sure and … fools for men that wander worse than bloody dogs.

Sean thinks about that. It can’t be so, though. Cate knows Julien’s sleeping with every whore in the house, probably sleeping with Dominic too just to be even-handed. And she doesn’t mind?

Sean turns that over in his thoughts, but what kind of sense can he hope to make out of it? And for what? He looks at Julien, who’s reflectively digging his thumbnail into the soft wood of the porch railing. Lucky little bugger, living like a bee in a honey-pot, and the queen-bee herself buzzing around him.

This time Sean does laugh, and when Julien looks quizzically at him Sean says it out loud.

“You. Like a bloody bee in a honey-pot. Good luck to you son, good bloody luck.”

"Merci beaucoup, Sheriff," Lando says, and executes a little half-bow (the effect of which is probably diminished by the informality of his dress, but which is so much a part of Julien's persona that he barely thinks of it until it's done). He smiles slightly, to show that he knows how ridiculous he is, but there is a little twist of anger lurking in his guts, and he knows well enough why.

He guesses no one wants to be thought an idiot by someone they rather like. Never mind that it's far better that Sheriff Bean find Julien La Fleur to be an amusing if slightly useless Frenchman with a weakness for pretty girls and trifling entertainments.

Better than the alternative by far, when Lando can feel the rounded edge of something metal pressing into the top of his thigh, something he ought never to have taken (doesn't remember taking off of the body, actually), but cannot bring himself to throw away, no matter how often he thinks that he should.

No, he can't afford to even consider this man's friendship; not when that could be as easily disastrous as his enmity. Better that the sheriff not think of him at all.

He turns away from Sean and curls his right hand around the porch railing, tipping his face upward, as though he's gone back to pondering the stars. He isn't sure enough of what's on his face to show it to anyone right now, let alone to this man.

It's almost worse that Lando nearly likes him (could like him, given very little provocation). It makes it harder, that he seems fair and honest, although he's not stupid enough to think that will matter if the truth ever does come out. He's always known that; knew it, and he did it anyway.

Some things can be simultaneously justified and unforgivable.

Sean looks east and sees the faintest stain of violet along the horizon, the first hint of the coming morning. The temperature is easing fractionally. Dawn will bring a few minutes of blessed relief, to be followed by the hammer-stroke heat of morning and noon and evening.

Sean pushes off the swing seat onto his feet and takes his hat off in order to put it on again.

“I’d best get away home,” he says, scuffing his boot heel on the top step. “I’ve a friend in the house and he’s not that well; he might need seeing to.”

The words sound and even feel easy, uncharged. It’s true. Hugo’s just sick and tired, worn out with this shite about Urban. Good riddance and God bless to whoever pulled the trigger on that bastard. Sean makes up his mind to do his damnedest to persuade Hugo to stay for a few days, so Sean (or rather Sean’s housekeeper) can feed him up and Sean can force him to get some rest.

Julien turns his head to look at Sean, and Sean recognizes the care with which his features have been composed into a pleasantly neutral expression. Sean presses out a smile, though he’s all too aware that he’s seeing only what the young man wants him to see.

Sean is halfway down the steps from the porch when an odd impulse causes him to turn and look back up at Julien.

“It’s all shite, y’know,” Sean says forcefully.

Julien arches an eyebrow quizzically, but Sean cuts in before he can say anything.

“All of it. Love – women – the things men do for money – for honor – for revenge. It’s all shite. It doesn’t mean anything. You find a piece of work to do, an’ a woman that’ll have yeh and won’t make yeh completely daft … ”

He takes his hat off again and beats it on the leg of his jeans, knocks the crease out, knocks the crease in. He squints up at Julien, whose face remains absolutely impassive. Bloody Frog. Sean looks down again, at his fingers reflexively stroking around his hat brim.

“It’s all shite,” he says again, and he’s grinning so broadly his cheeks are aching and fuck it all, it doesn’t matter what mistakes you make or what sins you commit, because it’s all a pile of crap anyway so the hell with it.

Sean’s gonna go home and see what’s fit to eat in the house and maybe if the heat eases later he and Hugo can ride out and look at that colt Sinclair’s selling and Sean wants but is loathe to buy from him of all people. And if the heat doesn’t let up, they’ll throw Ewan and Jude out of the jailhouse and sit in one of the cells – which are the coolest spot in town – and drink whiskey and play cards badly for penny stakes.

“Goodnight, Julien,” he says, putting his hat back on and turning again and going the rest of the way down the steps.

 _Hat_ , Lando notes, because it's automatic by now, marking a man's tells, storing things away in case he needs them later, and he understands the Sheriff's sentiment even while he's doing that. He's had the thought himself, he's wondered why he bothers with it all; he asks himself time and again why he comes back here, what it is, precisely, that draws him back every few months, like magnetism or destiny or any of a dozen other meaningless words. Why doesn't he just stay away. Safer for everyone if he did, not just himself, but for Cate (the things she knows could someday cost her everything, he knows this, knows it and hates it, but he doesn't stay away) and for Dominic and for half the girls in the bloody house as well.

He understands it, but he doesn't believe it. Even when he's most wanted to, he's never believed that it didn't matter. Even in the worst moments of his life (and those were always nights, never days, the worst things happen at night, the worst things are endings, always endings), he has never believed that there isn't some meaning to it all.

Even when he runs as del Acero, a stranger in his own skin, he doesn't believe it.

He isn't sure Sean believes it, either. He thinks he knows at least one man who believes it, and there had been a look about him, there had been a certain feel to him, that Sean just doesn't have.

Things have a way of getting better, or at least becoming different, that often distracts a man from that sense of pointlessness. Not that he can tell the sheriff that. Lando cannot tell him anything of the sort, and probably wouldn't, even if he could. Julien won't allow it.

It's funny, really, how the man he is has to defer to the man he portrays. Except, of course, that it isn't. How often does that have to happen before the man he portrays _becomes_ the man he is?

He doesn't know.

"Goodnight, Sheriff," he says softly, watching the hard line of Sean's back retreating down the street and telling himself that there is likely nothing he could have said that might have eased it anyway, and it doesn't matter that he'd chosen not to try.

A man has to be able to live with himself, after all.


	3. Altercation: Elijah, Sean, Yuma, Early September, 1880

Sean has always liked San Luis. It's a pretty big town, a fair ways to being a real city even by Sean's well-traveled standards. It has paved streets, in the better parts at least, and the fancier houses have indoor plumbing. Sean's job, as a deputy, was largely to keep the peace in the nicer saloons and gaming joints. When Sean went to a whore in San Luis, he could just drop his gun belt along with his pants, and not have to worry about getting shot while he was busy.

Sean sort of liked Prosperous too. It's a Godless lawless riot of a town, worse than even the dankest slums of London or New York for drunken violent debauchery. The dirt streets are quagmire in winter and rutted dust in summer, and the stink of sewage is enough to knock a man sideways from April to October. Sean's job, as sheriff, was to hunt down and kill enough of the wildest outlaws to keep the rest in some kind of semi-cowed order. When Sean had a whore in Prosperous, he'd just unbutton his fly, keeping his pants and gun belt on. He'd put his own back up against the wall so he could keep an eye out over her shoulder for trouble.

Yuma combines the best of San Luis with the worst of Prosperous. Sean can almost imagine himself staying here for the rest of his life, provided he doesn't live too long.

On a Saturday night, the rougher parts of Yuma are a good deal more like Prosperous than San Luis. Sean carries the Winchester slung by its strap and cradled in the crook of his left arm, that hand tucked into his coat pocket. The skirts of his coat are looped back, exposing the pair of point four four break top revolvers on his hips. He's sauntering along the dirt street, his gaze moving implacably over the rickety porches of the clapboard shanties: booze shops, whores' cribs, and a couple of dirty holes that claim the stuff they sell is food.

The sound of breaking glass makes Sean quicken his step a little. Someone snaps out a curse loudly enough to be heard over the jangle of an ill-tuned piano somewhere and the argument of a couple of drovers trying to hitch a restive horse to a supply wagon.

Sean comes around the corner to find a knot of young men on the porch of one of the less disgusting drinking joints. There's a slight scuffle, but whatever's at the center of the fray is sufficiently daunting that it's keeping the bulk of the participants at bay.

Sean lopes a couple of paces, coming close enough to make out a head of dark hair between the shoulders of the surrounding men.

Sean rolls his eyes.

"All right, break it up," he says when he's just a few yards off.

A couple of the men turn, and fall back a little as Sean comes nearer. Sean shoulders in, and huffs a sigh of absolute irritation at the sight of Elijah Wood – his dandy little coat smudged with dirt and his hair every which way – brandishing the broken off butt of a whiskey bottle in his fist.

"You, yeh little gob shite," Sean barks. "Put that down before I tan yer fuckin' arse for yeh."

Elijah turns at the sound of the voice, familiar cadences that tell him even before he sees the glint of a badge pinned on the man's collar that it's Sean. The Brit, as Harry has referred to him, is looking at Elijah with a thinly veiled combination of amusement and weariness. Elijah's never been called a gob shite before, but he has a pretty good notion of what it means, and no question at all about _tan yer fuckin' arse_. Sean shimmers out of focus for a moment, his edges blurring in the whiskey haze, but he snaps back when Elijah shakes his head. The set of his jaw is tight, and Elijah knows, amusement or not, that Sean could do it easily.

Still, Elijah's not one to back down from a fight in any event, and now his blood is thrumming high in his temples. He'd been ready to fuck Nick Brendon, had let himself be led, laughing, out of Dooley's, whiskey under one arm and Nick on the other; high times, until Nick had pulled out a dollar and brushed Elijah's chin with it. _How much?_ , Nick's tone oilier than his dark, slicked-back hair, and Elijah had seen fit to _feed_ him that goddamn dollar.

Now Sean's looking at him like he's a particularly naughty brat who's broken his mother's cookie jar, and that's just icing on the cake.

"You can fucking try," Elijah spits, tightening his grip on the bottle.

Sean sniggers, a sound that's sufficiently uncharacteristic to draw some startled looks from the other young men who've become embroiled in Elijah's little battle.

"Yeh mad twat," Sean laughs, which earns him a snarl of pure fury from Elijah.

Now, Sean's as much of an admirer of a pair of brass balls as any man, but there's a limit. And Elijah Wood – seventeen years old, all of five foot four inches tall and a hundred pounds wringing wet with his pockets full of quarters – challenging Sean to a fistfight is well past even the most liberal of limits. Sean's almost a foot taller, weighs almost twice as much, and once punched out a Clydesdale draught horse for a bet.

"Come on now, that's enough," Sean says more seriously, reaching out with his right hand as if to take hold of Elijah's wrist on the side where he's holding the bottle.

Elijah hisses, and slashes sideways with the broken glass, as Sean pretty much expected him to. So Sean's already yanking that hand back out of the way and letting the Winchester swing back on its strap on his left shoulder. His left hand, still in his coat pocket, comes up quick as a draw, pulling the folds of his coat skirts out of the tie that holds them back, and Sean bundles coat and his own hand and Elijah's hand and the broken bottle up into one baffled knot and yanks it in tight against his chest, perforce pulling Elijah with it.

"Drop it," Sean snaps, digging with his other hand until he locates Elijah's hand and closes his fingers around the bird-bones of Elijah's wrist and squeezes.

"Fucking – fuck you – fucking bastard," Elijah spits, and the smell of spirit on his breath is stronger than from the slop basin of the bar he's been drinking in.

"Drop it!" Sean roars, and although Elijah – hissing with pain, nonetheless – doesn't obey, Sean does find the right spot between tendons and muscles to dig his thumb in deep and Elijah's fingers fall open despite his best efforts.

The bit of bottle tumbles out of the folds of Sean's coat and explodes into pieces on the porch boards.

"You must really like the accommodations in the jail," Sean says, shoving Elijah off by the grip on his wrist far enough to avoid Elijah's spiteful attempt to kick Sean in the kneecap. "You keep this up, and I'll hafta have Mister Sinclair send your stuff over permanent, like."

Elijah twists again, swinging at Sean in what might be a punch or a slap or an attempt at a clawing. Sean steps and shifts, using his considerable advantage of bodyweight to get himself out of the way and leave Elijah off-balance and without an accessible target.

Sean swipes at him, just clipping the top of Elijah's head with the flat of his fingers.

" _Ow_."

Sean switches his grip to the back of Elijah's neck, taking up a goodly handful of coat collar and shirt and narrow feverishly hot nape.

"Come on, walk, or I'll kick yer arse every step of the way," Sean says grimly.

Just when Elijah thinks the night cannot possibly get any worse, Sean has snatched him up like a puppy caught pissing on the hall rug, and that humiliation is crowned by his glimpse of Nick, tucked back safely into the shadows, escaping notice. But Elijah notices, sees Nick's smug expression and laughing black eyes, and he lashes out blindly -- at Nick or at Sean, it makes no difference. He's rewarded with a sharp hiss as his elbow catches Sean in the ribs, but the victory, such as it is, is extremely short-lived. There is an enormous _shove_ and the ground comes up to meet Elijah.

"Fuck...you," Elijah repeats, trying to draw his knees up under him to stand. In the pale light spilling out from Dooley's he can see Sean's boots walk around in front of him. He starts to stand on wobbly legs, and makes it about halfway up before Sean catches him with a backhanded blow to the face.

The world flips the other way as Elijah falls, onto his back this time. The coppery taste of blood fills his mouth and mixes foully with the ashes of whiskey. He's bitten his tongue, but Elijah thinks Sean probably pulled the blow. Otherwise Elijah wouldn't be conscious to smell the piss-soaked dust when he turns his head to spit. Elijah hears a couple of men laughing, one of them probably Nick.

Elijah lies still, though. Suddenly he's all out of fight, drunk and bloody and wretched in the filthy road, and he thinks with no small amount of self-pity that he's surely a fine sight. Good thing that no one who matters is there to see.

Sean leans down.

"Are yeh done?" he asks, his voice tight with nothing more than irritation and dawning boredom.

Elijah glowers but doesn't answer, which is sufficient admission in itself.

"Get up," Sean says impatiently, though he bends down and catches a fistful of Elijah's coat front and bodily lifts him before Elijah has a chance to even attempt to do as he's told.

Sean's sorely tempted to sling the kid over his shoulder like a recalcitrant steer calf and carry him to the jail, as being more efficient than having to drive or drag the little bugger every step of the way. But Sean was there last night when Ewan stood in the street scuffing dirt onto the insteps of his own boots, trying to dry out the mess Elijah had made when he spewed out more sour whiskey than it should be possible to fit into that small body in the first place. If Elijah does for Sean's coat, they can have it to bury the little brat in.

Elijah, however, seems to have reached some degree of resignation to his fate, and when Sean starts him off with a good shove he sort of half-staggers half-ambles along with further complaint. Sean keeps a hold of the back of his coat collar, though he's pretty sure Elijah's too drunk to try for a dodge and run. The townsfolk out enjoying the slight respite from the heat that the nights are beginning to bring hardly glance in their direction; this is an all too familiar tableau.

Ewan's sitting in the front room of the jailhouse, eating something out of one of the returnable tin plates from the cook shop a couple of blocks behind the jail.

"Jesus, not again," he says, when he sees Elijah.

Sean rolls his eyes at Ewan and snags the cell keys from their hook.

"This isn't a hotel y'know, Lij," Ewan yells as Sean herds his prisoner down the narrow hallway to the cells.

"Fuck you!" Elijah yells back, getting another stinging flip on the ear from Sean's hardened fingers for his trouble. "Ow!"

Sean shoves Elijah into one of the unoccupied cells.

"Twenty-five dollars," he says, locking the door. "Statutory fine for being drunk on the street, plus resisting arrest."

"Fuck you," Elijah says, though his tone is more despairing than angry now. "Where am I gonna get twenty-five fucking dollars from, locked up in here?"

"If yeh've got a nickel, yeh could get some kid to run with a message to Mister Sinclair, I'm sure," Sean goads.

"Ah … fuck you. Just _fuck you_ ," Elijah sighs.

Sean raps his knuckles on the cell bars, and turns away, and goes back down the hallway, leaving Elijah to consider his conduct.

So the night has gotten worse. It could be worse still, Elijah knows, although just at that precise moment, leaning his forehead on the rough coldness of the iron bars, it's hard to keep that sort of perspective. Better this jail cell, which, as these things go, is actually clean (Sean runs a tight ship, from what Elijah's seen) than lying in the street, beaten bloody if not dead.

Elijah staggers upright, goes over and sits down on the thin mattress with its ticking cover. His boots, he sees, are very much past hope, caked with dirt and God knows what else, and he toes them off. His head is spinning with the alcohol, the edges of the cell graying out in spots like a drawing that's partly erased, and he groans before he can stop himself. Suddenly all he wants is to sleep, but the nagging thought that he'd better come up with a way to get Harry to bail him out of here keeps stinging at him, a persistent mosquito.

Harry will _not_ be pleased, Elijah knows. He's been making this too much of a habit of late, and Harry's patience has a definite limit. Elijah doesn't think Harry will leave him here, at least not indefinitely. There is still too much that Elijah can do for Harry, things accomplished best with warm, young, talented flesh, a commodity Elijah most certainly possesses. But Elijah knows Harry is perfectly capable of shooting his favorite horse if it becomes a burden to him, and Elijah isn't foolish enough to think he's any different.

"Fuck you too, Harry," he mutters thickly, head in his hands, and the words come out far more like a sob than he'd intended.


	4. Trigger: Dominic, Yuma, September, 1880

"Take it, ya shite bastard." Colin shoves a pail of dirty, half-melted ice shavings at Dominic and flicks a soggy rag at him. It catches him across the hip as he tries to twist away and Colin leers, throwing the rag down to wipe off the bar. "G'wan," he says.

"Thought I was the entertainment," Dominic mourns to Cate as he passes her and then winks at Jewel over her shoulder.

Cate rolls her eyes, possibly still irritated with him about the slight row earlier, and remarks, " _I'm_ finding this all very entertaining."

"Hardy har." Dominic sniffs and kisses Liv on the cheek on his way out back.

It's cool out tonight, clear, the moon a thin yellow sliver. He smiles as he drizzles the water into the struggling, English flowers he's been trying to cultivate beside the dank little path behind Cate's, Kingsfoil and dry, tough heather. By the time Julien comes back -- by his count it'll be less than a fortnight -- the moon will be full, and they'll be able to fuck with the lamps off, moonlight striping Julien's brown skin with bands of glowing white. Dominic will doze while Julien keeps guard and then maybe they'll fuck again, just before the sun comes up, until Dominic is so sore he'll be begging Julien to stop and he still won't.

He snorts and puts the pail down, fishing in his trousers for his last fag that he'd nicked from Colin this avo. Julien's turning him into a woman, which is damn ironic.

He flips the pail with his boot and lowers himself onto it, scraping a match on a rock and lighting his fag. Julien had brought him some lovely things months back, left them on his nightstand with his payment. Something sweet rolled in with the tobacco, that made his lungs buzz pleasantly.

Julien, he mouths, blowing out smoke, letting his eyes sink closed and his free hand stroke himself slowly through his trousers.

"Thinking of me, you fucking fairy?"

Dominic jerks his head up and there's George Eades, standing not ten yards away, Norman Reedus and Cushing and the red-haired wanker, Blake maybe, flanking him like the loyal dogs they are. All four look hard and mean and dirty, Eades most of all, a sneer curling his thin lips.

"Evening," Dominic says, casually, to cover the pounding of his heart. He takes one last drag and drops the fag in the dirt, standing and crushing it under his bootheel.

"Not so quick to run your mouth now, are you, boy?" Eades advances, his hands in his front pockets.

Dominic's fairly certain it's not his fault when he gets into situations like this. His mum always said he was blessed with his da's silver tongue, it was just that -- as with most of the Irish that crossed over to England back then -- the silver ran out fast when liquor was about.

So when he'd called George Eades a queer, hours before, so many now he almost can't remember it happening, it wasn't quite the insult he knew Eades had meant it as when he slung the word at Dominic; unfortunately, Dominic's voice had been more cutting than clever.

"Birds of a feather, as you Yanks like to say," Dominic had drawled, and the girls around him tittered as Eades' face grew red and blotchy.

"You wanna clarify yourself, son?" Eades asked, shoving Dominic up against the wall.

Dominic smiled, the exact way he's trying _not_ to smile now: more of a smirk than the easy, non-threatening expression his face is currently arranging itself into. "You and Harry Sinclair," he said, "I assumed, because arse-bandits, as we like to say back in jolly England, know our own."

It had been patrons then, laughing at Eades and his red, sweating face. Patrons and the girls and the one or two toffs Dominic had picked out for the evening.

Cate had thrown Eades and his mates out before any real harm was done, and the sense of victory left Dominic buzzing with fierce energy that he would need to fight or fuck out. Preferably both at the same time.

By the look on Eades's face, there'll be none of the latter, not that Dominic would accept it from him.

"Easy now, mate," Dominic says, holding his hands up.

"I'm not your mate, fairy queen."

Dominic rolls his shoulders, tries to calm his erratic heart, his irrational temper. Just a bleeding piece of shite, Eades is, and Dominic swallows against the bile in his throat. "My apologies, Mr. Eades." Dominic can feel the smirk he'd been struggling against blossoming on his own lips; he inclines his head slightly toward Reedus and says, "Mr. Reedus. I didn't mean to insult you or your lover."

He's not sure how he doesn't see the first hit coming; one second he's standing, rocking on his bootheels, and the next he's staggering back, cupping his hand over his nose to stop the spurt of blood that runs into his mouth. He smiles, shakes his head, wiping his palm on his trousers. Another pair of trousers to be patched up, Liv'll have his head for this one. "All right, there," he says, licking the blood off his upper lip. "Good shot, and with fair odds, four on one."

"I'd think you'd be used to it, whore." Eades swings, and Dominic grabs his arm, uses Eades's own momentum to swing him around, sending him crashing into the low wooden fence, cracking the top beam.

"Leave off, Eades, I've no quarrel with you." Dominic's voice shakes from the pain setting in, his nose most definitely broken, blood still gushing from it. He spits into the dirt and breathes deep, trying to calm his jangling nerves. Four on one, and he's put Eades between himself and the back door.

"You've just bought yourself one, boy," Eades says, pulling himself up, and Dominic tenses, waiting for Eades to come at him. Eades smiles, his eyes cut right, and Dominic has one horrible moment of realization before Reedus grabs his arms, pulling them back and hooking his elbows into Dominic's. He struggles as Eades approaches, kicks Reedus in the knee and is able to free one arm; Dominic registers the wet sound of his fist hitting Eades's jaw. One good swing, but before he can congratulate himself Reedus is back up on his feet, dragging his arms back behind him, bending one knee into Dominic's so he can't replant his feet to get his balance.

"Hold him, boys," Eades says, grinning a nasty grin and rubbing his jaw. Cushing grabs one arm, and they hold Dominic crucified between them.

He can't exhale fast enough before Eades's fist finds his way up under Dominic's ribs, making him choke on the bile that instantly floods his throat, sagging, gagging and dry heaving.

With the next blow, Dominic's knees give out and he voimits weakly into the dirt, coughing so hard he can't catch his breath. Fuck, he thinks desperately, fuck, and Colin not fifty paces away, fuck, _fuck_.

"Gonna regret ever coming here," Eades snarls, and his fist snaps Dominic's head to one side. "Scream," again, harder, and Dominic's ears are ringing, "Scream, whore."

One more and Dominic can't contain the wail at the almost unbearable wash of pain that floods between his temples and through his jaw; he thinks he hears something _crack_. He can barely hold himself upright between the two of them, and the ground is swimming in front of his eyes. Blood fills his mouth and runs down his chin, and when he spits again he spits something painfully, horrifyingly _solid_.

"You like this, fairy? This what you like men to do to you?" Eades grabs his chin and forces his head up.

Dominic knows his smile is ugly, reckless. "You tell me."

Eades drives his fist into Dominic's belly; a thin, reedy noise is forced from Dominic's throat along with his breath.

For a moment, his vision goes grey, his arms feel like they're at their limit, pulling from the sockets, and he thinks he actually might suffocate to death, with Eades's voice the last thing he'll hear.

Dominic snaps for breath, and Eades grabs a fistful of his hair, dragging his head up. "You need to learn respect, son." He nods, and his men let Dominic go, his face smashing into the hard-packed earth.

For a moment, he thinks he must have landed in the dregs of the dirty water, but the ground is wet with blood and snot, dripping from his face and he's crying noiselessly, tears turning the dirt to streaks of mud, caking on his cheek and knuckles.

Eades and his mates are laughing, and Dominic pushes himself to his hands and knees, dragging himself toward the back door, the soft yellow lamp inside like a distant sanctuary. Earth gets in his mouth, in his nose, dries his throat and slows what little breath he's able to pull in, making his scream soundless when a heavy boot -- round tip of a work boot, not Eades's fancy, pointed ones -- catches him in the kidneys, sends him down again. Another, still not Eades, gets him in the ribs and suddenly every breath is too shallow and crushingly painful.

"Cate," he wheezes, but he can barely hear the shrill whisper inside his own head.

Knees hit the ground next to him, and Dominic wishes he even had it in him to pray for it to be over. But he can't, he's got too far and his mum's god would never take him like this. Julien's name pounds through his blood, turns into a mantra, I'll make it, Julien, just a few more days, I'll make it, and he squeezes his eyes shut, struggling weakly when hard hands turn him onto his back, when knees come down on his wrists and an oppressive weight comes down on his chest. I'll make it.

When Dominic opens his eyes, Eades is grinning down at him, his teeth stained pink with his thin blood. "C'mon now, boy, I can't be any worse than your frog." Eades laughs, looking up at the rest of his pack and Dominic's heart spikes hard. "Yeah, folks talk in this town, if you know where to listen." Eades leans close, his breath thick and peaty-sour. "He's made it tough for me and Harry and the fellas. And Harry, leaning on that bitch anyway, he don't listen. But me," he bares his teeth. "I know all about you and him, and you with no ties here _but_ him...Harry'll thank me for this, and here I woulda done it just for fun."

Dominic moans, finds a burst of strength to buck, to gnash his teeth. "Kill you," he snarls and Eades only presses down harder.

"Don't think so."

Dominic feels a giddy bubble in his chest and he's out of his head, tears tracking down his temples and dribbling into his ears, blubbering like a girl, like a fairy. "'Mazing," he pushes out, "what men say to naught but strangers." Eades' face is frozen, half-smiling, half-sneering. "'Cos me, I listen, too. And fool's not what I hear you call Sinclair when you think no one's round."

It's just a guess, a hysteria-induced guess, and it takes the last of Dominic's strength to force the words out, but Eades' face goes white, then bulges purple with anger and he clenches his meaty hands around Dominic's throat. "Who."

Maybe this is where his mum's god might think it was okay to knock him up and Dominic drags in one last breath. "Piss. Off." And he spits in Eades' face.

Eades roars and he lifts Dominic's head from the ground, squeezes Dominic's throat closed. His lungs burn instantly from the lack of oxygen and he kicks frantically, his hands twisting under Eades' knees.

"Some _whores_ ," Eades rasps, spittle spraying Dominic's face, "like some horses, are just bad, can't be broken." He bears down, his eyes black voids in his twisted face.

Dominic's lungs work desperately, sucking in on nothing, and white stars edge his sight, washing everything out. No, he thinks, but he can barely move his limbs, they feel heavy, weighted down. Forgive me, Julien.

"Some whores," Eades continues, from far away, "like those same horses, need to be put down because they're worthless, diseased _animals_.

"Eades," one of the others says, "Come on, partner."

Eades swims above him, and a wash of warm water fills his head.

"C'mon, George. You're killing him."

"Don't, Eades, don't."

And suddenly, air explodes into his lungs, setting his insides on fire. His body pulls into itself and his lungs work so hard he almost passes out. For a moment, he feels like he's floating, but then he's pulled up, slammed against a wall, wood scraping the unbroken skin on his face raw. There's the smell of tobacco burning -- one of his gang has lit up a cig. Tears sting his eyes again, thinking about his last fag, Colin, Cate, Julien, the life he thought he'd lost.

He's so glad for air, for the smell of a fucking fag, for the fact that he's even feeling any pain, that he doesn't anticipate his trousers being torn, shoved down to his knees.

No, he mouths; for all the fear he'd been taught about rent boys, he's never had to suffer this. He's half dreaming, half plunged back under the water and he knows it's fuck all compared to death, but for a moment, he wishes for anything but this.

Eades holds his bare hips hard, digging his fingers in, grinding his prick against Dominic's arse, and even through denims Dominic can feel that he's hard. "Tell your bastard frog," he breathes against Dominic's ear, drooling on Dominic's pulpy, raw face, "to keep his whores on a tighter leash, or someone's gonna get hurt."

Dominic's almost grateful for the scrape of Eades' belt-buckle on his arse, because the bright pain keeps him tethered to consciousness long enough to think, burn in hell, I hope you burn.

"Monaghan, where the bleeding hell'd you get to?"

It's Colin. Dominic bites down on the urge to call out -- he would kill himself before he would subject Julien to this, let Julien walk into a snake pit.

Colin, he repeats to himself. It's Colin, not Julien, and you keep your mouth shut.

"Next time, boy," Eades says, and he leans up, the smell of tobacco so close it makes Dominic choke. "To remember me by," he says, and plunges the lit tip down on Dominic's wrist where he's holding both against his back.

Pure, icy pain singes away the last of his grip on the real world, and Dominic watches it slide past him sideways when Eades lets him go, hears Colin shout, sees Colin's horrified face for one moment before the ground comes up to meet him.

"Jul-" he mumbles. He can hear the muffled sound of Colin shouting for Cate, smell a hint of Colin's spicy aftershave cutting through the smell of piss and mud, but it all seems like a dream.

"Christ, Monaghan, you fucking cunt, open your fucking bastard eyes, or I swear, I'll kill you myself, c'mon, lad, c'mon."

Dominic drags his eyes open and it's like looking up through cloudy water, Colin's face scared and angry.

He takes a rattling breath. "Alright, Colin," he croaks, and Colin's face seems to crumble with relief.

"Alright, Dom."

Dominic's not sure his face is smiling, because he can't seem to make anything work, and then the earth pulls him in, closes over his head.


	5. Games: Harry/Sean, Yuma, September, 1880

At just after midday, the streets of Yuma are as busy as they ever get. There are enough people on the wooden sidewalks that some maneuvering is necessary to keep from knocking into others, but Harry doesn't bother. People get out of his way.

Some people because it's polite, though those folks are in the minority. Mostly, it's either because he's rich or because he's dangerous.

He's both of these things, and while having people know the first doesn't bother him, he likes to keep the second to himself as much as possible. Of course, people _will_ talk. Even people he pays, under the right circumstances, and that's part of why he's out and about town when he'd far rather be overseeing certain matters of business, comfortably behind his own desk, smoking a cigar, mayhap, and sipping brandy.

This is the third time in five days that he's bailed someone in his employ out of jail, and he's getting mighty tired of it. The fact that the first two times had been the same person -- Elijah -- is beside the point.

Elijah is a problem, and always will be. Harry knows this, understands it's simply the way of things with Elijah, and he has to either take the bad with the good, or simply toss the damned brat out for good. For now, at any rate, he's inclined to take him for what he is.

This, however... well, this is another matter entirely.

Elijah... well, he can understand Elijah ending the night drunk and belligerant in Sheriff Bean's holding cells. Elijah is a handful. He doesn't even blame the sheriff for it. God knows Harry hasn't had any luck curbing the kid's stupid antics, and he's been mad enough to lock Elijah away a few times (most notably for near to three full days in Harry's stripped down "guest room" about five months previous) himself.

Eades is a solid man, though, and just now Harry needs him. He can't afford to have him in jail over a barroom mishap, not when Norman had sworn up and down that he and three other 'hands had backed up Eades's story. It wasn't like anyone died. Cate's piano player is a healthy young buck, Harry is sure he'll be right as rain in a few weeks.

He's been avoiding this confrontation for some time now, but it's getting to where he hasn't got a choice. He's going to have to talk to the sheriff. This isn't the first time one of Harry's men has ended up in the poke for crimes that barely even qualify as such in Harry's book. It's bad for business, but even worse, it's bad for Harry's _reputation_. All business is built on reputation, after all, and Harry can't afford the talk.

And he _needs_ George Eades right now. Not next week, not even tomorow, but _today_ , and he'd known as soon as Norman had shown up without Eades that he was going to have to handle the sheriff himself this time, after weeks and months of avoiding it.

Dammit.

The only bright side to the whole thing is that Cate's goddamned Frog isn't around. That too-pretty bastard would probably take it personally. He always does, when it comes to Cate or Cate's place. Interfering sonofabitch.

On the other hand, a thing like that might have ended up the day with La Fleur keeping Eades company in one of the Sheriff's five by five's, and that might have at least given Harry a reason to smile.

He almost smiles just thinking of it, but as he reaches the Jailhouse and turns toward the door, he nearly trips over Sheriff Bean's long, lanky legs, which are stretched out across the sidewalk in front of the rickety old rocking-chair he's currently occupying, battered stetson tugged down low to shade his eyes from the early afternoon glare.

He's rolling a smoke on one knee.

"Sheriff," Harry says politely, and nods a greeting, taking a step back both to give the man some room and to give himself some room. "Afternoon."

“Mister Sinclair,” Sean responds, pushing his hat back on his head and drawing his feet out of Sinclair’s way.

Sean’s smile might pass for cool politeness, but the shine in his eyes is genuine. Sean’s not in the mood to be amused – not with Dominic still unconscious the last Sean heard, and Cate coldly composed despite the red rims of her eyes, and Julien off God knows where doing the devil knows what when he’s probably the only one who can comfort her – but this is becoming downright bloody funny. It’s Sinclair’s third trip to the jailhouse in five days.

The first time Elijah got locked up – Friday night – was none of Sean’s doing, in fairness. Ewan was the one who extracted a brawling spitting Elijah from the middle of a melee in just about the dirtiest slop-shop in Yuma, getting a stomach’s worth of bile and sour beer on his boots for his trouble. Sean’s inclination would have been to give the little shite a swift kick in the rear to set him on his way home, but Ewan’s a more compassionate soul. He knew Elijah was in no condition to wander the streets so he locked him up for the night. No one was more surprised then Sean when Sinclair, tight-faced but polite, turned up himself on Saturday to retrieve his stray.

So when – on Saturday night - Sean was called on to break up a fight on the corner of Fifth and Arizona and he found Elijah with a broken bottle in hand, Sean’s lifting him by the scruff of his dirty neck and hauling him back to the cells and locking him up again was at least partly in the nature of an experiment. And sure enough on Sunday Sinclair was back with a face like thunder but a voice like silk, and the bail-money for Elijah.

What’s unexpected is that Sinclair’s here again for Eades. Sean can sort of imagine why Sinclair might not want to send someone else for Elijah – for one thing, Sean imagines Sinclair would be eager to clip the little fucker’s ear-hole for him at the very first opportunity – but Sinclair’s got plenty of people he could send with the money for Eades’s bond. So this is more than a visit of simple necessity.

Sean knows this has been a long time coming. He and Sinclair have had only a few cursory social interactions, otherwise circling each other with wary respect. By and large Sean doesn’t have a problem with Sinclair: he assumes the man’s a crook and a thug like any rich man, but Sinclair seems to confine his attentions to the other big businessmen in Yuma and the surrounding towns. Sean figures the wolves can eat each other and it’ll all be to the good. It’s Sinclair’s hired hands that annoy the shite outta Sean, throwing their weight around in town.

Sean unfolds from his chair, sticking his cigarette between his lips but not lighting it.

“We can step into the office, if yeh’d like,” he says mildly.

Harry nods -- the fewer people he has to worry about listening in to this particular conversation, the better -- and lets the Sheriff precede him into the office.

It's dark inside, most likely merely in contrast to the extreme glare outside, and about ten degrees cooler just on account of being out of the direct sun. Harry takes a brief look around, but there isn't much to see. There's a gun cabinet against the wall behind the Sheriff's desk, something functional if somewhat rough, and the Sheriff's desk is about the same. There's nothing on it to interest Harry much, just the usual detritus of an occupied work station, a tin coffee cup, a few papers, a partially folded map, a couple of books, and what looks to Harry like a woman's glove. The cells are through the back, Harry knows, and there's another, smaller desk pushed up against the wall, probably used by one or both of the deputies. If anything, the top of it is even more cluttered, but Harry barely glances at it.

The Sheriff gestures toward an empty straight-backed chair situated near the desk, but Harry shakes his head. He doesn't want to be here long enough to bother with sitting, and this is not a social call. He thinks better on his feet anyway. The Sheriff doesn't look particularly surprised, and he doesn't go around the desk to sit down in his own (slightly more comfortable looking) chair, either. He hikes one leg up instead, propping his ass against the corner of the desk with a genial nod, and invites, "What can I do for you?"

"George Eades," Harry says, as though there is any reason to announce why he's here, as though there might be some other reason. Harry watches Sean as he fishes in his shirt pocket for a match and then pops it alight on the edge of the desk. He curls his hand around the flame as he lights his cigarette, though there isn't any wind inside to speak of.

When he's done, he shakes the match out and drops the burned stub in the tin cup. It makes a little hiss of sound as the hot wood hits the dregs of whatever was in the cup, and the Sheriff nods his head, clearly not surprised.

Harry doesn't sneer, though he can feel his lips wanting to tighten and curl, and bites back the urge to snarl out his opinion on the job the man has been doing so clumsily for the last several months. Like a bull in a china shop, he is, no finesse at all, and that's just one of the reasons Harry has been avoiding this encounter. He's not in the habit of keeping his opinion to himself; unfortunately, in this case, he really can't afford to piss the sheriff off. He can't afford the attention.

The sulfur-smell hangs in the air like the blue-white smoke-haze drifting around the Sheriff, and instead of snarling, Harry makes his voice mellow and off-hand.

"I understand he and Cate's young piano player had a set-to last night, Sheriff. I'm as in favor of keepin' the peace as the next man, but from what I'm hearing from folks as was present at the time, I'm not clear on why he's even here."

Possibly not the most diplomatic route, but better than some, and though Harry hasn't actually had a lot of face-to-face interaction with the Sheriff, he's made it his business to know what sort of man he is. There's no use in pussyfooting; that's something, at least, that they have in common.

“Well, thing of it is of course, I don’t know exactly what you’ve heard,” Sean says mildly. “But I can tell you what I’ve _seen_. Dominic Monaghan’s been beaten to a bloody pulp; he was unconscious when I got there and hasn’t woken up yet, last I heard. And the funny thing is, the only bit of him that hasn’t got a mark on’ em is his knuckles. Doesn’t look like he got a single punch in. But your man Eades, now, his hands are a fair mess. I’ve seen a hell of a lot more than my share of fistfights, Mister Sinclair. I know what punching a man in the mouth does to a bloke’s knuckles."

Sean takes his hat off and uses the gesture as an opportunity to turn his right hand over, displaying the thickened and hardened skin over his own knuckles, hard-won armor from a thousand fights, paid and unpaid. He sets his hat down in the midst of the chaos on his desk and rakes his fingers through his hair.

"And those _folk_ as were there when it happened? Norman? Cushing and that kid with the red hair? They looked like they’d had a bit of a go themselves: bit o’blood on their clothes, dirt on their boots from the alleyway, knuckles bruised … but not so much a black eye among the lot of them. Now, I understand this may seem trivial to you Mister Sinclair, and I’m loathe to inconvenience you by keeping your employee locked up here. But,”

and Sean looks Sinclair in the eye, steady and truthful and just a little regretful

“Mongahan’s taken a beating that shouldn’t have been given to a dog. If he dies from it, I’m gonna hafta see George Eades hang for murder.”

Sean leans back a little, rubbing the side of his index finger against his chin, unconsciously shrugging the tension out of his shoulders. He's always been good at this part: staying relaxed and centered while he waits for the other fighter to make a move.

The Sheriff lays it out a little more abruptly than Harry might have expected, maybe, but Harry isn't unduly put off. He'd known coming in that things were likely worse than Norman had made them out to be. In his experience, grown men can be a lot like children when they're caught doing something they know is wrong.

He doesn't like the sound of that last bit, though, doesn't like it at all. "I see your position, Sheriff, I honestly do, and I'm not questioning your methods or your sense, but it may be that this whole thing has been blown out of proportion. Cate's fond of her piano player -- Monaghan, did you say his name was? -- and she's got every right to be upset, but I was given to understand that the kid had taken a few lumps, and we've all done that at one time or another." Harry doesn't display his own hands, though he's got scars enough on his knuckles. A pissing contest is the last thing he wants, and besides that, he hasn't used his hands himself in a long time. Bad for business. "Like as not he'll be right as rain in a few days, and Eades is a solid man. He's not what you'd call a repeat offender, not someone you've had here before or might expect to see here again."

Which is completely true; Eades has a good head on his shoulders, and while Harry might have expected something like this from someone else, it wouldn't have occurred to him to worry about Eades landing himself in this kind of trouble. Especially not _now_ , when Eades has got things to do, people to find. Eades doesn't have the kind of temper that some men do, and Harry's guess is that Monaghan (whose name he knows very well) had set him off with his smart mouth. Likely he'd offered George something (either in truth or in jest) that George had felt compelled to refuse. Violently.

Some men are like that, Harry knows, though he's never been one of them himself. Obviously.

He guesses the Sheriff might know the same thing, but he also guesses that won't matter.

"Now I know how men can be with a belly full of whiskey, and that a drunk man will sometimes act a damn sight different than the same man sober, but Eades isn't that kind of man. Chances are, if there was trouble, it was something Cate's piano player brought on himself. Now I know that don't make it right, and I'm not suggesting that George get away with acting the fool. What I'm saying, Sheriff -- and I appreciate that you're taking the time to discuss this with me, I know you don't have to -- is that George is not the kind of man not to face the music. But in the meantime, I've got things I need to have him doing, and I'd appreciate if you could see your way to setting him loose. You'd have my assurance that he'll be around, should you need to get your hands on him again."

Sean turns that over, not bothering to stifle his smile, though he does take a ferocious drag on his cigarette and then squints into the ribbon of smoke as he exhales. Sinclair’s actually being rather more reasonable about this than Sean expected. Hoped? Scratch that, that’s just the devil in him talking.

“Aye, all right,” Sean shrugs. “You say he’s not about to skip outta town, I’ll trust you on that.”

Sean manages to undercut any possible value the word ‘trust’ might have in that sentence by the tone of his voice. He’s on a no-lose here though; either Eades will be around if Sean wants him or Sinclair will look like an ass. Either way, Sean will get something he’ll enjoy.

“You can have ‘im out on a one hundred dollars bond.”

That’s high enough for Sean to be pretty sure Sinclair won’t just take the hit and let Eades leave town – it’s not that much money to Sinclair, but it’s more than a shite-hawk like Eades is worth – but low enough that it’s not a bald challenge to Sinclair.

“An’ I suspect your fellas won’t find much of a welcome in Miss Cate’s for a while, so I’d consider it as a real kindness if you’d advise them to take their business elsewhere, like.”

Sean’s contemplating the real advantage of letting Eades go: any day now Julien’s going to come home and no doubt take extreme exception on Dominic’s behalf to Eades’s attitude, to say nothing of his actions. Sean suspects Eades stands a good chance of being slit from throat to groin and tossed in a dry-gulch, and he’d hate to think he was interfering by having Eades locked up. As long as Julien does the job clean and quiet, Sean’s going to stand way the fuck back and let him get on with it, tin star not withstanding.

The penalty for murder’s hanging, right and proper, but Sean’s got a fair idea of what Eades’s problem with Dominic is, and in his mind there’s not much to choose between a killer and the kind of spineless fucking shit that has to prove his so-called masculinity by enlisting three of his friends to help him beat on a fella half his size. And besides, he’d be surprised if Dominic had even gone so far as to issue an invitation that wasn’t clearly solicited. Dominic’s too fucking smart for that, and Eades – to Sean’s admittedly untutored eye – is just too fucking ugly.

Harry nods, arranges his features into something like puzzled sympathy. "I hear you, and I can do that, surely, I can tell my men to stay out of Cate's if that's what you want, but I do employ a sizable chunk of the town, Sheriff, and if Cate's business suffers, she's not likely to thank you. She's still got rent to make, just like everyone else."

The Sheriff gives him an inscrutable look, the cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth while smoke streams up into one eye, which is slightly squinted.

"You mean, I guess, to tell them that you named off to steer clear? Eades, of course, and Reedus, and Blake?"

It's not much, but Harry does business from gut instinct just as often as intellect. Generally speaking, his instincts are good, and even in cases where it's more about pride than about business sense -- he recognizes well enough that this might be one of those -- it usually works out for him, because pride is a matter of appearance just like anything else, and more things than just business sense affect a man's ability to do good business. He wants a concession from the Sheriff, and he wants it for no reason other than the fact that Harry is the one giving up the money, giving up face, even if it's only a little, and in spite of the fact that he has not the smallest intention of keeping George Eades in town for one minute longer than he absolutely has to.

The urge to just haul off and punch Sinclair in the snot is so strong that Sean actually twitches with it, and he wisely occupies his hands by taking a final drag off his cigarette and crushing it out, then retrieving his hat from the desk and smoothing the edge of the brim with his fingers.

"Aye, that'll do nicely," he says, gracing Sinclair with a smile that even feels a little stiff and so is presumably a complete bust from where Sinclair's standing.

But that's okay; neither one of them has any illusions about the other's regard. They'll keep making polite, reasonable noises at each other as long as they can, even though they both know that sooner or later there's bound to be an open conflict.

Sean shoves his hat back on his head and snags the keys to the cells from among the books and papers on his desk.

"I'll let 'im out, so," he says. "And - I'll let you know what happens about Monaghan."

He makes a point of not looking back at Sinclair, of not seeing the lack of reaction in Sinclair's eyes. He's not sure he can confront Sinclair's indifference to Dominic's living or dying and not do something enjoyable but very bloody stupid.

Funny, Sean thinks. Given that Cate and her household - with the exception of Liv, obviously - are inclined to keep Sean at arm's length, he's feeling uncharacteristically pissed off on their behalf. He shrugs again, letting it go, letting it fall away from him.

"Eades, you fuck-artist," he calls as he walks down the narrow passageway to the cells. "Put your boots on and get your bloody arse off my cot, you're out of here."


	6. Interventions: Cate, Dom, Lando, Sean, Yuma, September, 1880

Lando rides into Yuma just before supper time on what he's privately certain is the dustiest day of the year. The problem with the desert is that it's so bloody dirty. He brushes at the light coating of dust on Julien's trousers, then shrugs in defeat. He won't be able to do a damned thing about this mess without a horsehair brush and possibly a third arm. Bugger it.

His current horse doesn't like him, and he's a bit put out with the amount of money he'd wasted on the mule-brained animal. It's pretty enough, to be sure; a high-stepping thoroughbred the same color as Lando's skin, or close enough to be flattering as hell for a vain sod like Julien La Fleur, but he's picky as shite, and Lando will be glad to leave him hitched outside Cate's.

"All bloody night if you don't mend your ways," he mutters, and one of the gelding's ears flicks as though he knows Lando's remarks are directed at him. "That's right, you ill-tempered menace," Lando adds. The gelding snorts, and Lando smiles in spite of himself.

Yuma is quiet, basically shut down until evening brings out the rowdier element, though Lando sees a few people about, mostly lounging on porches. He tips his hat to those he recognizes, adding a bit of a stylized (if somewhat limited by the horse) bow and a wink for the ladies.

Harry Sinclair and several of his underlings are gathered on the porch outside the Royale, all huddled together in a group and likely planning all sorts of nastiness. They carefully avoid looking at Lando, and he returns the favor with pleasure.

He has no proof that the bloke he ran into outside of Bullhead City came from Sinclair. Lando didn't have a chance to ask the bloke any questions between the bit where he shot at Lando and the part where Lando stabbed him. There is no _proof_ of anything with Sinclair. Except for extreme arseness, which Lando's fairly sure isn't contestable, Sinclair has every appearance of being a more or less honest businessman.

Still. He can't quite stop himself from glancing at Sinclair. When he sees Sinclair looking back, nothing on Earth can stop him from smirking and sketching a bow.

Sinclair smiles tightly and nods, which amuses Lando for all of two seconds, and then worries him.

By then it's too late to do anything. Not that he has any clear idea of what he'd do. He's past them and Cate's is in sight, and he'll be damned if he'll delay his arrival because Sinclair gets under Lando's skin. Sinclair always has, after all.

Nothing new about that.

There are lamps lit at Cate's, but it's still a bit early for the real customers to show up. Family men are still sitting down to supper and most of the ranchers are only just now thinking about calling it a day.

He's grateful, truth be told. He could use a few quiet minutes at home, such as it is.

He grins as he dismounts, and is still grinning as he knots his reins around the post and drags his saddlebags down off his stupid horse's back. The gelding harrumphs at him as if to say it's about time Lando got the hell off.

He stops smiling as soon as he turns toward the door, weight poised on one foot to step forward.

Cate is standing in the doorway. Waiting for him.

In his experience, such a thing is never a good sign.

To Cate, there’s something almost dreamlike about the wrongness of this situation. It’s not the first time she’s faced a fight for Lando’s life, and she’s praying it won’t be the last time either. But in the past, the struggle has always begun with a shock of blood and fever, and Cate fought for him because she didn’t know how to do anything else.

This time, she knows it's coming, but all she can do is wait.

She’s armed herself, in the paltry ways she can. She gave some kid a nickel to watch the road for Julien – who’s known by sight and reputation, at least, to everyone in Yuma – and come tell her the second he saw him approaching. It’s a week day evening and hotter than hell, so the house won’t be particularly busy tonight, but Cate’s arrayed in her very finest evening gown of heavily embroidered steel gray silk. She’s loaded with jewels, but wearing less rouge on her lips and cheeks than usual, and her hair is simply looped up loosely at the nape of her neck with no ornamentation. In short, she has consciously contrived the toilette she knows Lando finds most alluring. She might almost feel a pang of guilt, where it not for the potent mixture of dread and determination filling her guts.

He sees her, and stops at the bottom of the porch steps. His grin slides and sours, and Cate doesn’t bother to dissemble her own grim expression.

“What is it?” Lando asks, but he doesn’t make any further move towards her. “What’s happened?”

“Come upstairs,” Cate says.

He sets his chin, and for a second she thinks he’s going to argue, but then there’s sound of someone plinking random notes on the piano in the front parlor, and he nods once and comes towards her. Cate walks through the house to the back hallway and opens the door to the narrow back stairs and goes up, her stiff skirts lifted in both hands.

 _They carried him up these stairs, six women with Lando's limp body slung in the folds of a sheet, the night he made Cate a widow._

As Cate sets foot on the first landing, she sees the door of Dominic’s room ease silently closed the last couple of inches. Cate turns the landing and goes up the second flight of stairs.

 _Dominic, lying bloodied and battered in his narrow bed. Cate took her turn nursing him when Liv and Jewel would let anyone else do anything for him. Cate was the one who sent for Sean; Cate was the one who sat on the stairs in the dark and cried when Dominic finally woke after almost three days. But she never fought for him the way she had for Lando; she never breathed fury against his pale lips, she never told him she’d damn him to hell if he died on her._

Cate opens the door of her rooms, and Lando follows her in. He crosses to the couch, dropping his saddlebags on the floor in front of it. Cate has remained more or less where she came in, and she takes the step or two it requires to put her between Lando and the door.

He has a temper like fury, flaring quickly and violently. But he’s also smart and subtle, provided he gives himself a minute or two to think rather than letting the momentary burst of his anger make his decisions for him. She doesn’t have to stop him; she just has to slow him down some.

“Lando. Something happened to Dominic,” Cate begins.

Lando freezes, his eyes turning hard and black.

“But he’s all right, Lando. He’s fine. Everything's fine."

Cate has put herself between Lando and the door.

He doesn't think for a moment that it was accidental.

Bad then. Bad enough that she's afraid of what he'll do. He considers moving her out of his way. He could do it easily enough; even with the weight of her best dress, Cate's so light even the stupid gelding wouldn't complain of her on his back. But he doesn't. The most expedient way to find out what happened is to talk to Cate.

If the time comes when he has to move her, he will. Simple as that.

"Tell me," he says, and watches her hands curl in her skirts and her eyes flicker away from his for a bare instant.

He thinks of the way she sounded saying he's fine, everything is fine. Not like she was lying. More like she was hoping. Not that he thinks Dominic is still laid up somewhere; Cate would not be cruel or stupid enough to keep Lando here, talking, if Dominic were in actual danger. Rather, he thinks she's hoping to soothe the worst of his temper before he sees Dominic, and that just makes him more inclined to think that whatever happened was very bad indeed.

"Tell me," he repeats, and she nods a little impatiently, as though he interrupted her as she was gathering her thoughts.

 _Was it Sinclair?_ he thinks, but doesn't say as Cate opens her mouth, because he can't tell if he's hoping that it was or that it wasn't. It seems likely to Lando, it seems very bloody likely, because Sinclair is just that kind of bastard.

And -- tell the truth and shame the Devil, his mum used to say -- he'll be damned if having a reason to kill Harry Sinclair doesn't sound pretty bloody good right now.

"He … got into a fight," Cate says.

It's a lie, of course. A fight is what happens when Dominic spends his evening off drinking in one of the lesser gin-joints and laughing with some of the handsomer young men from around town, and maybe the night's entertainment ends with Dominic coming home in the early light with a necklace of soft bite-marks around his throat, or maybe with his eye blackened and his knuckles bruised, but either way he seems sated. The girls always make an admiring fuss over his injuries, and there are more customers than usual interested in that boy of Cate's, while the smoky, self-satisfied look lasts in Dominic's eyes.

Lando's gaze – pitch black, hard as glass – slides away from Cate's face, and she knows he can hear the lie in her voice. She's pretty sure he's figured out why she's lying, too.

"With George Eades, mostly, but Norman Reedus was there, and Cushing, and Tom Blake."

Lando looks back at her, and whatever fury Cate's ready for, she's not expecting the slow satisfied curl of his mouth. Cate's stomach contracts in cold fear.

Lando wants this. He wants a reason to walk out of here and walk up to Harry and kill him.

Cate knows Lando would rather she were the reason, but she won't ever name what it is Harry's doing to her, won't ever ask Lando to do what she knows he's so willing to do for her. Because the only thing that makes people kill in coldly controlled fury, is love. And she and Lando don't love each other … or if they do, they will never, by word or deed or look, admit it to themselves or each other.

Lando does love Dominic.

"Four of them?" Lando says blandly. "Dominic is such a hot-head."

And of course, they both know that Dominic is many things – teasing and impulsive and high-spirited – but he's also pragmatic and easy-going and always, always, fundamentally in control of himself.

"I should see him," Lando says, and Cate knows that the cool casualness of his tone is a very bad sign.

"Of course," she says, her own voice ringing falsely light.

She stays where she is, hoping for … something that's not going to materialize.

"Now," Lando prompts, and Cate's guts turn again as she realizes she can either get out of his way or be put out his way.

Cate turns and opens the door, moving quickly to the top of the stairs.

"Dom?" she calls, but she doesn't bother to put any force behind the summons because he's right there at the bottom of the steps.

This is the first time Dom's left his room since the beating. Cate is frankly amazed that he's on his feet – though he is gripping the bottom post of the banister with such grim determination that she suspects Dom's just as amazed as she is. He's been managing to move between his bed and the chair in his room only because Liv and Jewel put their arms around him and half-support half-carry him backwards and forwards. His face is still thickly shadowed with half-healed bruises and his lower lip is bisected by a black-blood split that keeps scabbing and then reopening when he coughs or yawns or uses a cup incautiously. The unmistakable imprint of a hand – four fingers and thumb – is branded on the left half of Dom's throat in bloody plum-red pressure marks.

"Dom, would you come up?" Cate asks, but Lando's already at her shoulder, and any hope Cate had of containing this situation is gone.

Lando's first impression is that Dominic is in an oddly shaped pool of shadow standing where he is at the foot of the stairs.

It takes three steps for Lando to realize that it isn't shadow bathing the left side of Dominic's face and the darkness around his throat is more solid than shadow can account for.

The fury in Lando's belly, a tight and burning knot, doesn't abate, but he is suddenly cold with mistimed fear, absolute horror at something that hadn't actually happened.

He doesn't precisely recall going down the stairs, but he is abruptly standing in front of Dominic. It's close quarters, and by all rights the two of them should be touching in some way, the brush of knees or hands. God knows they have touched in such a way before, on these stairs, even.

Dominic doesn’t actually pull away from Julien. It’s just that seeing him here, finally… his already weak knees buckle a little, and it’s all he can do to keep himself upright, hanging onto the banister with both hands. And Julien’s too good with body language, probably so good he doesn’t even recognize it himself, damn him to bloody hell, so he stops just short of actually touching.

Dominic wants to touch. He wants to sag forward into Julien, he wants to finally let all his muscles unwind, he wants to sleep instead of pass out, he wants to sink down to his knees and beg Julien’s forgiveness, confess everything, that he started it, that he kept it going, that when everything is said and done he’s a _whore_ , and what makes him think—

Instead, he prises one hand off the banister and braces himself against the wall on one side, forcibly opening himself up and when he thinks he has his bearings he stands as straight as he can, running his sweaty palms down the length of the scarf he woke up wearing.

He hasn’t regretted or despaired yet, but he’s afraid now, when it actually counts, it’s all over his face.

He winces when Lando catches his chin and tips it up so that he can take a good look at Dominic's face. Dominic cuts his eyes away, and the cool fury crouched in Lando's belly burns away, immolated and engulfed by a surge of bright, clear rage that edges his vision with red and makes his hands curl with _intent_.

It isn't the mottled bruise that stretches from Dominic's jaw and disappears into his hairline on the left side of his face, or the half-healed split on his bottom lip; it isn't the bloodspot he can see in the white of Dominic's right eye, or the crescent shaped bruise beneath the same eye; it isn't the cut he can see, scabbed over on Dominic's bruised cheekbone, or even the necklace of bruises Dominic is wearing that attest eloquently to the intentions of Sinclair's goddamned goons. Those things are bad, yes. Dominic must've been a bloody mess. He must have been half-dead, and Lando remembers what's that like, and that is bad.

What settles him into killing rage is Dominic looking away, the brief flash of something in his eyes that Lando also recognizes.

Guilt.

Guilt. Dominic feels guilty because some useless, brutal wankers beat the hell out of him, feels _responsible_ , his shoulders round and defeated, his hands twisting restlessly within the loops of the scarf slung loosely around the back of his neck.

"When?" Lando demands hoarsely, because the tight, drawn look to the skin around the scabs on Dominic's face say that these cuts are more than half-healed. But then he decides he doesn't give a damn.

He sees the line like a precipice before him. He's seen it before, and he knows what it means to step forward and what it would mean to step back.

Dominic looks up at him, eyes dark and swirling for a moment, and Lando knows he won't step back. He's stepped back from Sinclair too often, has allowed him to brutalize and bully the people Lando loves, and whether or not Sinclair instigated this doesn't matter. Lando wouldn't put it past him, but it doesn't matter. Sinclair's boys just follow his lead, and they always bloody get away with it because Sinclair, and by association his goons, are untouchable. Nobody ever _pays_.

And he's had enough of it, dammit.

Cate comes down after Lando, and the narrowness of the stairway means she's trapped behind him, looking over his shoulder at Dominic.

"Ten days ago," Dominic says softly, in answer to Lando's question.

Cate's struck by how absolutely still Lando is, how the line of his spine and shoulders and the curls of his hair on his collar don't so much as stir with the motion of his breathing. Lando takes another step down, which as far as he can go with Dominic standing where he is at the very bottom of the stairs.

Cate reaches out, steadying herself with one hand flat against the wall. The abruptness of her movement draws Dominic's glance. Cate feels her own eyes widen in mute appeal.

 _Stop him_.

The protests are already sharp in her throat, and her hands twitch with the urge to catch Lando by the coat sleeve and physically hold him back.

Dominic's eyes flick away from Cate's, back to Lando's, and in that moment Cate understands what she's done wrong. She's had chances to let Lando fall in love with her, to bind him to her as much as any woman can bind a man, and she didn't take those chances. It's Dominic, having accepted Lando's heart so easily, who'll make the choice here.

"Julien," Dominic says, and Cate's heart contracts with despair because Dominic doesn't even know that isn't Lando's true name. "You don't have to."

And Dominic's tone isn't a protest or a plea, just a bland statement of fact. Lando nods, once, and puts out his hand as if to set Dominic aside, and Dominic gives way, across the bottom of the stairs, pressing himself against the opposite wall to leave the way clear for Lando to simply step past him and walk without haste along the landing and down the main staircase.

Cate shudders in as much breath as she can around the pain blossoming in her chest. Dominic looks up at her, and Cate almost reels at the dead flint flatness of his gray eyes. Not for the first time, she feels a small sour flare of anger at these men, with their silences and their unassailable certainties.

Cate picks up her skirts and turns and runs back upstairs, plunging through the doorway to her room and slamming the door behind her, desperate to reach a hiding place before the sob searing her throat finally wrenches itself free. She hurls herself on the bed, the explosion of her tears actually painful in its violence. She claws at the sheets, clean and white in actuality, but grim with Lando's blood and sweat in Cate's recollection.

Harry will have to kill him in self-defense, or Sean will have to hang him for murder. Either way, she's finally lost the battle she's been fighting for his life ever since the first moment she saw him.

Lando is aware of Cate fleeing up the stairs to her rooms as he turns to go down the main stairs and into the front parlor. He can hear the rustle of her dress and the silence that means she's holding her breath, and he doesn't doubt that if he lives through this, he'll have hell to pay on that front.

He's equally aware of Dominic still standing on the landing, still and quiet and beaten (but by no means cowed, even with that half-shamed guilt hanging off of him), and willing, as always, to let Lando take the lead, make the decisions, choose his path.

Lando's known it since that first night (morning, really, because he hadn't been able to tear himself away from Dominic's body until it had been nearly as familiar to Lando as his own), since he got up and dressed slowly while Dominic feigned sleep, since he hesitated with his wallet in his hands for what seemed like a small eternity before sliding out several crisp notes and laying them gently on the bedside table, since Dominic hadn't stopped him, hadn't objected, hadn't, in fact, mentioned money at all; Dominic will never try to hold him.

Dominic will stand aside and let Lando (Julien) do what he has to do.

Lando isn't always sure that he wants it to be that way, but right now that suits him just fine.

Right now his nerves are tight and fine, drawn into the kind of thin, taut wire that can cut a man's throat if looped around it, and he's all right with that.

He's aware of the girls as he passes them, and they know him well enough to let him be. Or perhaps they had been waiting for this, waiting for him to come back to Yuma, since Dominic had been beaten. Because, yes, they know him. Only Liv actually moves, a single step toward him; he doesn't look at her, but from the corner of his eye he sees how her lower lip is caught between her teeth, sees her eyes slide past him to the stairs, looking for Cate or for Dom or perhaps both, with her eyes wide and her brows drawn together in concern.

He ignores her.

He crosses the parlor in silence, and the two or three gents already in attendance steer far clear of him.

He unbuttons his coat on the porch of Cate's house and glances at the sun.

He'll be approaching Sinclair from the west, and that's just as he likes it; walking out of the sun. His hands loosen the knives in their sheathes automatically, and he takes the half dozen steps necessary to take him to the street.

His boot heels are silent in the packed dirt, and he is smiling as he walks toward the Royale. The smile feels good on his face, solid, and it doesn't bother him in the least that the people closest to him in the street are turning away, ducking into shops, changing direction abruptly.

He is done, and it's almost a relief. He is done hiding behind Julien's charm and wit and humor, using Julien's style to both attract and deflect the attention of others, and it's surprisingly liberating. He is what he is, what time and ability and circumstances (and Billy) have made him, and for once it's going to work in his bloody favor, for once the killer in him is going to give him what _he_ wants.

Dominic thinks it's the first time since they met that Julien has actually treated him like a whore. Julien didn’t mean to, probably didn’t even know he was doing it. Not many people are used to Dominic actually asking for something, Dominic included, and it’s possible, even, that he’s forgot exactly how.

He leans heavily against the wall and presses a hand to his chest, rubbing away the wheeze that’s still caught in his lungs.

Cunting bastard, there are tears stinging his eyes again.

Guilt and betrayal drag him down, a weight in his belly and legs. He had a moment of doubt and Julien fulfilled it: he couldn’t say _don’t go_ but he thought maybe, maybe Julien might hear it anyway. His skin crawls that this would be their last touch, hard hands on his arms setting him aside, not even really _seeing_ him.

A worthless, diseased animal was how Eades saw him, maybe how most of the town saw him. And him and his sodding pride…

A sobbing breath tears from him and he pushes away from the wall, forces himself to close the distance to the porch, tripping down the steps.

Dominic staggers in the sunlight, the relentless glare slicing a dagger into his good eye, but he pushes forward, propels his nearly useless body across the dusty road. There's a weight bearing down on his chest, forcing all the air out of his lungs, and he has to stop, brace his hands on his thighs and wheeze for breath. "Julien," he tries, but it's thin and reedy and Julien's not stopping. "Julien, dammit!"

Julien stops, but doesn't turn back to face him, and Dominic drags what feels like a nearly dead leg behind him as he approaches Julien. Julien's hands are at his sides, twitching, and his head is cocked to one side.

Dominic gently takes his arm and turns him round.

"I mean it," Dom says, stupidly, and Julien shakes his arm loose.

"And I, as well," he replies, his voice hard and cold, his eyes like shiny stones.

"Are you bloody daft?" Dominic spits, trying to take Julien's face in his hands, but Julien steps back, knocks his hand away, but carefully, and Dominic's heart stutters, like it's a sort-of victory. "Stop this, it's mad!"

"He will never stop," Lando sneers, taking another step back from Dominic, intensely aware of their audience. "That is the way of men like him, and his crétins merely echo his behavior."

Dominic laugh, a touch hysterical, grinds in his chest. “Why are you giving them exactly what they want?”

“I’m not. I’m finally doing what _I_ want.”

Dominic again has this disconnection with his facial muscles and he has no idea how to bloody _speak_ , how to ask for what he wants. “Give me… give…”

Lando softens his voice at the expression on Dominic's face, the slight flinch in his eyes. "Do you think that I do not understand the consequences, Dominic? I am not a stupid man. But this is not the first time Sinclair and his men have harmed those that I... have an obligation to protect. It's not even the tenth time or the twentieth. I am _tired_. I am _done_."

He shakes his head, and then holds up a hand to stop Dominic when it's clear he's about to object again.

"No," he says, softly, but it's nothing short of an order. "Do not. They do not understand consequences, Dominic, they have never had to face them. But they will. I will _make_ them. And it is _not your decision_."

Julien takes a step back at Dominic's frustrated silence, then another. "I am not sorry," he says, and they stare at each other for what feels like hours; Dominic feels they're having a battle of wills, but he thinks that maybe Julien is memorizing his face, the way he looks now, and letting his anger burn away everything that is not righteous vengeance, the sort his mum had taught him about before they left for America. Julien turns away, making his steady, deliberate way to the Royale, to death, one way or the other.

"Fuck!" He feels as helpless as he did that night, forcing himself on after Julien, now alone, whose handsome face actually makes the polite folk of Yuma stare at him, slack-jawed. Dom wants to scream at them, but there’s bile in his throat, burning him, making it impossible to speak.

He can't make it to the Royale. He knows this. Even if he could, he'd be no use, not with this weight on his chest, his useless leg, his head clouded with _fear_. He gasps for air, his fist pressed to his chest and struggles not to think about what will happen if Julien kills, if Julien _dies_.

He's already far enough away from Cate's front door that he may as well be lost in the desert, and his eyes burn from the dryness, from pain, from the already crushing loss that's piling on top of the boulder bearing down on him. He desperately casts about for help, for anyone, even if it's just someone to prop him up long enough for him to make it to the Royale.

Across the street, one of Bean's Deputies is lounging on the front steps of the Sheriff's office. Dominic wants to rage at him, didn't he see the cold fury on Julien's face?

Bean.

Before he knows what he's doing, he's there, dragging himself up the steps. Ewan stands, “Holy Christ, Dom—“ and puts his hands out, trying to catch him, but Dominic bats him away.

"Where's the Sheriff, quickly, is he here?"

“He’s here, it’s okay, lad, just sit down—“

Dominic shoves him away but then doubles over, coughing up dust and phlegm and a little blood. "Please," he wheezes, even as the Deputy is going for his six shooter, crouching over Dominic and calling for the Sheriff, "Please, for God's fucking sake, it’s not me, just… where is he?"

And then Bean is there, crouching in front of him, speaking in low, soothing tones, even though Dominic can't seem to translate them. Dominic feels hot tears of relief flood his eyes -- fucking pansy shirt-lifter don't fucking fall apart now, man -- and he clutches at Bean's arms, struggles to lift his head. "It's Julien. It's Julien and Harry Sinclair."

There's a spilt second when Sean's body is still soaked in the pseudo calm that comes to him in moments of crisis. He's distantly aware of his own hand on Dom's shoulder, not stroking so much as palming pressure into the muscles and bones, as he has with countless startled or floundering animals.

Then everything clicks back into motion. Sean pushes up onto his feet and yells for Jude.

"You stay here, take care of 'im," Sean says to Ewan over the hollow thunk of boot heels on floorboards as Jude comes running.

Of Sean's two deputies, Ewan's faster with a gun and keener in a fight, which exactly why Sean wants the cooler and more considered Jude with him this time.

Sean takes off a run, Jude on his heels, because the Royale's only a few short blocks away and it'll take longer to throw a saddle on a horse than it will to just sprint. Townspeople stumble aside as the sheriff and deputy careen past.

Sean drops to a long-stride walk as they come level with the Royale, Jude following suit.

Lando has to dismiss Dominic from his mind, has to leave him standing in the street with that look on his face that says so clearly that he expects never to see Lando again. Not alive, at any rate.

And he is _not_ sorry. He should have done this years ago. Should have done it for Cate, all her hedging and soothing be damned, should have done it the first time a man came for him in the night (with a knife, in an alley in Phoenix) and muttered Sinclair's name (when Lando gave him the choice, talk or die) before Lando bounced his head off the brick wall and left him unconscious on the cobblestones. Never mind proof. He knows, has always known, that Sinclair is far more dangerous than he lets the general population know. Men like him, men with money and prestige (like Lando's stepfather) are never quite content with what they have. They are always looking for the next acquisition, and in order to get some things, obstacles must be removed from one's path.

Obstacles like the Sheriff before Sean Bean, obstacles like Mr. Sutherland, who'd been a good man and a good friend of Cate's, who would never have allowed Sinclair to terrorize her, and who had enough reputation of his own to have given Sinclair a run for his money, had it come down to reputations and the opinions of the good folk of Yuma.

He doesn't _know_ that Sinclair had anything to do with the untimely demise of either man.

But he _knows_. If not them, then others, and on at least three occasions that Lando is sure of, untimely demise had been in the cards for Lando himself, if Sinclair had gotten less incompetent goons. Any other town, and Lando would have taken care of Sinclair long before things came to this. That's easy to believe, of course. There is no other place like Yuma. There isn't anywhere else Lando stays long enough to have made an enemy like Harry Sinclair.

He has enemies at the table, and there have been times when he's had to deal with them in bars and in alleys and even on the road, but this is different.

Sinclair doesn't leave Yuma. If he did, Lando might be inclined to wait, catch him on the road in another guise, with another name, with a sawn off shotgun, mayhap, belonging to the kind of hombre that didn't much mind using it. If he did, Lando might have taken that road long before now.

It doesn't matter. It isn't an option. _This_ is his option, his only choice, and he's done forgoing it to protect himself.

He's done staying his hand, and he knows what it will cost him.

Everything, of course. Things this important always do.

And when it's done, he'll get on his bad tempered gelding and ride out of Yuma, hopefully ahead of the law, and he'll disappear into the badlands. There are caves out among the mesas, and Lando has things there to outfit himself. Julien can disappear forever.

Lando isn't even certain that he will miss him.

And it's enough to set him smiling again, in that steady, precise way, so that when he gets within sight of the Royale (and the men on the porch, three of them counting Sinclair, and one of them is George Eades, Lando is pleased to see) he is calm, certain, determined.

Sinclair turns toward the street when he sees Lando coming. Eades and his friend -- Norman Reedus, Lando sees, and feels his smile broaden a notch -- fan out behind Sinclair, and Eades already has his hand on the butt of his pistol.

 _Twitchy bastard, isn't he?_ Lando thinks, sharply amused, and walks right up to the foot of the three steps that lead up to the walkway in front of the Royale.

"You might consider keeping a closer tether on your dogs, Sinclair," he says pleasantly, and nods in Eades's direction. "If he clears leather before I gut you and leave your stinking carcass to draw flies on the boardwalk, why, I believe the good Sheriff would believe it was self defense on my part, Ne trouves-tu pas?"

There is something like hilarity in his voice, Lando can hear it, and he cocks his leg to rest his foot on the bottom step.

Sinclair makes a fall back gesture with his right hand, tipping his head back slightly but not actually turning to look at Eades. His eyes don't leave Lando's except to flicker briefly to his knives, exposed at his belt by his unbuttoned coat. Eades, faithful dog that he is, eases his hand away from his gun.

"It is my understanding," Lando says, his voice still pitched just so, ringing with amusement that is sharp and quite clearly threatening, "that your favored odds are four to one, Monsieur. Would you care to call out another man? It would not do for you to feel uncomfortable."

"What the hell do you want, La Fleur?" Sinclair growls. "If this is about that boy of Cate's, you can just walk your ass right back up the street. The Sheriff has already taken care of that to his satisfaction." Sinclair's voice is a dismissive sneer, but his eyes cut to the right sharply, and Lando understands, takes the remaining pair of steps both at once, crossing to within spitting distance of Sinclair before the idiotic bastard thinks to _move_.

 _Soft_ , Lando thinks, as Eades and Reedus both stagger backward, and no gesture in the world on Sinclair's part will be enough to keep their guns in their holsters this time, Lando is sure. It doesn't matter.

Lando catches Sinclair by the shirtfront and reels him in. Sinclair staggers forward, nearly falling into Lando, and Lando is both disgusted and amused that he's spent so much time _not_ killing the man; this is going to be so bloody _easy_. He keeps Sinclair's body between himself and the other two blokes on the porch until Lando's backed almost against the house wall, the pair of them so close now that they're breathing in each other's air; Lando can smell Sinclair's supper on his breath.

There is a knife in his hand -- Lando has ceased to be surprised when that happens without his conscious intent -- and he flicks it up almost casually into Sinclair's field of vision at the same time that he hears the double- _click_ of two guns being cocked, and he still isn't worried as he sets the blade neatly against Sinclair's throat.

The plan, inasmuch as he has one, is really quite simple. Keep Sinclair between himself and the other three until Sinclair is dead, use the body as a shield and toss knives at the rest of them until _they're_ dead, and if worse comes to worse and he runs out of knives, well Sinclair helpfully carries a forty-five, though he is apparently too stupid to know when to use it. His hands are up and empty, palms toward Lando, abject surrender, totally recognizable as exactly what it is.

"I wasn't even there, you stupid goddamned Frog," Sinclair says, and he sounds calm enough for a bloke about to get his throat cut.

Lando would very much like to think of it as complete stupidity, but while Harry Sinclair is many things, he is not often stupid. Lando suspects it is more likely to be overconfidence, in point of fact. Sinclair has always been untouchable. Even now, even with the point of Lando's blade pressing against the pinkening skin of his neck, Sinclair doesn't think he will die. He is doubtless sure that one of his men will get a shot off, and Harry, open-handed and clearly helpless, will be completely blameless, his reputation intact, his business likely only improved by the stories that will certainly result.

Lando takes a great deal of crystalline pleasure in disabusing Sinclair of the notion of immortality.

"You do not understand," Lando murmurs, and drops him a slow, deliberate wink. "I do not _care_."

And he finally has the satisfaction of seeing fear flicker into existence in Sinclair's eyes.It's both better and worse than Sean feared.

Better, because Julien's still on his feet and so's Harry, and Sean more than half expected to find one or other or both of them already a piece of bloody meat. Worse, because Julien's gone for the up close and personal approach. He's pulled in tight against Harry with a knife glinting gold in the low evening sun against Harry's up-tilted jaw.

Sean makes a curving motion of one hand and tips his head. Jude nods, and walks away from Sean, circling slightly as he approaches the porch of the Royale so he's coming in from the side, giving him a line of fire on Eades and Reedus well clear of Sinclair and La Fleur.

Sean walks straight on towards the porch steps.

Julien's gaze – flat black, killer cold, and Sean wasn't sure if Julien had that in him, and this is a shite fine way to find out he does – flickers over Harry's shoulder to Sean. Julien blinks. Harry doesn't try to turn, but there's a subtle change in the set of his spine and the tilt of his head. Sean realizes that some shift in Julien's demeanor has told Harry there's someone behind him, someone Julien thinks is going to try to stop him.

Sean's fairly disgusted that Julien's right.

Julien says something to Harry, too softly for Sean to make out the words, but Harry's whole body goes taut, his head tipping back as though to put as much space between himself and Julien as possible.

Sean comes to a halt at the bottom of the porch steps.

"Julien," he says, and his voice is rock-steady and quite soft. "I need you not to do that."

Eades shifts and Sean looks in his direction.

"Youse pair, put the guns away," Sean says, and then when they don't move to obey, "I said put them the fuck away!"

Jude pumps the action of his rifle loudly, drawing attention to his presence. At this range, a shot from the rifle would be enough to cut a man in half. Eades and Reedus very slowly and grudgingly reholster their pistols, though Sean knows they're just waiting for a trip in Jude or Sean's attention before they draw again.

Sean looks back at Julien, who hasn't moved an inch.

"Julien," Sean says. "I'm talking to you."

 _Bugger_ , Lando thinks, but it's oddly without heat, and for a moment he exerts a bit more pressure with the tip of the knife. Sinclair's potential bluster dies with a silent gulp, but Lando has to force himself not to make the slight movement, the tiny shift of pressure it would take to prick Sinclair's skin.

It doesn't take as much force as one might think to slide a knife into flesh, even flesh as riddled with bone and tough tendons and cartilage as the human neck.

He isn't exactly surprised at Sean's presence.

He hadn't really expected to get away without encountering some resistance. He had hoped, but he hadn't _expected_ to.

He had thought to have more time before Sean showed up, however.

It hadn't occurred to him that he would have to kill Sinclair while Sean watched him, and he... hesitates.

 _Bugger_ , he thinks again, and there is heat this time. He narrows his eyes on Sinclair's face and concentrates fiercely on _why_.

"I'm busy, Sean," Lando says finally, perfect rhythm and intonation. "Come back in five minutes, if you please."

It's the 'Sean' that does it.

It's been a couple of months since the night Sean came upon Julien on the porch of Cate's house, and they had that odd, looping conversation in the course of which Sean called Julien La Fleur by his first name. Julien never reciprocated, and Sean went back to addressing him as 'Mister La Fleur' the next day.

This is the first time Julien's ever called Sean by _his_ given name.

Sean takes a minute to tell himself he's likely to get himself killed too.

"Julien," he says again.

It's not even an attempt to keep Julien's attention. It's just to let Julien know where Sean is, that he's putting his foot on the lowest step, that he's easing his weight up, and then onto the next step again, and so on. It's no more than Sean would do for a spooked horse, letting his voice give the animal time to acclimatize itself to the idea of his proximity.

"I'm sorry," Sean says, and he really bloody is, he's sorry Julien wasn't cold enough and smart enough to handle this the way Sean's handled things in the past – with a rifle and enough distance between him and his prey that they never got a sense of where the fuck the shots were coming from before it was all over.

Julien's gaze flickers questioningly over Harry's shoulder, just a sweep of his eyelashes up and down that Sean can see as he approaches from behind Sinclair's back.

"I can't let you do this," Sean says.

Julien's jaw tenses and the skin under his blade stretches paler, and Harry breathes shakily through his nostrils.

Sean swings his gun up, pressing his lips together sourly and stepping around just another pace so he's presenting his side to Julien, and the muzzle of the point four-four's trained over Harry's right shoulder straight at Julien's face.

"Please," Sean says, and he can hear the roughening edge of his own voice. "Julien. Don't make me do this – not over a piece of worthless fuckin' shite like him. Besides … come on, your Cate's gonna bloody murder me if I don't get you home soon. Come on. She already doesn't like me; she'll be right bloody put out if I kill you."

Lando smiles only because a smile is Julien La Fleur's customary expression, and is practically expected, even in a situation such as this.

But in truth, the mention of Cate makes him curl his fingers more tightly around the hilt of the knife in his hand. He feels an impending tremor strain at the muscles of his forearm, not fear but rage. _Cate_.

She has suffered at Sinclair's hands over and over, and never mind that it was nothing like the manner in which Dominic had suffered. That there are no _physical_ marks, Lando understands -- has always understood -- has little bearing on whether or not there are scars.

He turns his mind deliberately away from what Cate must think of this.

He can feel the smile still on his face, unchanged by the knot of fury behind his breastbone, but there is a thin trickle of blood seeping down Sinclair's neck, staining his pristine white collar deeply red.

 _Oops_ , Lando thinks, and almost wants to laugh at the deep, almost purple flush on Sinclair's face, the thin line of his lips, the squinted, furious eyes.

Sinclair can't seem to decide if he's terrified or enraged, and Lando can't _quite_ stop himself from shifting his wrist, twisting the tip slightly, so that Sinclair hisses and fresh blood wells out of the tiny cut.

"You stinking, stupid goddamned _Frog_ ," Sinclair snarls, but he shuts up abruptly at the almost unbearably loud _scrape-chuck_ sound of Sean slowly cocking his pistol right next to his ear, though the gun is still firmly pointed toward Lando, and not menacing Sinclair at all.

But the timing isn't lost on Lando in the slightest; Sean had done it directly in response to Sinclair's little tirade, and again, right on the verge of just letting his arm _flex_ , just _pushing_ , he bloody hesitates.

And damn it, killing a man is something Lando can do, something he _has_ done, but killing in cold blood in front of witnesses, doing it in front of _Sean_ \-- who Lando cannot quite stop himself from thinking of as not only a potential ally, but as an _almost-friend_ \-- well, that is another thing entirely.

 _Look away_ , he wants to say, _just look away for half a minute, and I will let you hang me in the morning, I won't try to hurt you to get myself away._

Instead, very quietly, he says, "Some things you cannot let go."

“I know,” Sean says.

It’s a bloody lie, though. The one thing Sean knows all about is letting go, walking away, willing yourself to forget. He’s never met a man or woman or principle he couldn’t just as easily leave behind. But, still. He’s stumbled across enough men – Julien, for one, Hugo for another – who don’t feel that way.

“I know you want to do what’s right … what’s fair,” Sean goes on.

Julien’s frozen, not easing the pressure on the knife against Harry’s throat one particle, but also not applying the slight shift of weight that Sean knows is all it takes to put a really good blade through human skin. Sean doesn’t need to wonder if Julien’s blade is good; he’d stake his life it’s the finest money can buy.

“And as far as fair to Harry Sinclair goes,” Sean says, his voice even and low, “I’d say cut the fucker’s throat and good luck to yeh.”

Harry makes a squashed sound that’s part fury part fear, and the ripple of his larynx under the blade is enough to thicken the beads of blood into a trickle.

“But I’m not sure yeh’re bein’ fair to anyone else … to Dominic, say.”

Julien doesn’t move, but there’s something – some flicker of his eyes or change in the tension of his body – that tells Sean he has a decent portion of the man’s attention now.

“He’s near spat up a bloody lung after coming runnin’ to get me,” Sean says. “I shouldn’t wonder if he’s goin’ to be on ‘is back for another week after this - ”

George Eades makes a noise that’s dangerously close to a snigger. Sean glances in his direction.

“Jude? I think Mister Eades is thinking about going for ‘is gun. If he draws your attention again _in any bloody way at all_ , shoot ‘im.”

Jude nuzzles the stock of his rifle into his shoulder and smiles in anticipation. Eades darts wary looks between the deputy and the sheriff, closing his mouth very deliberately. Sean swings his attention back to Julien.

“Any road, as I say, Dominic’s put himself out a bit teh get me, because he wanted me to try to stop you doin’ exactly what you’re fixing up to do right now.”

“Is he all right?” Julien asks, and Sean has to resist the urge to just sag with relief.

“I don’t know,” Sean says honestly. “An’ outta the various ways this can go, Julien, I best like the one where you an’ me just walk over to the jailhouse an’ see how he’s doin’. So how’s about it?”

Julien’s blade stays where it is, but Julien’s dark gaze at last slides sideways over Harry’s white and clammy face, to Sean.

A long, hard look at Sean's face is enough to convince Lando that he's telling the truth. That's not to say Sean can't hide what he's thinking; Lando thinks Sean's probably pretty damned good at it, when he tries.

But Sean's not trying. Lando can feel it the same way he can feel the itching, twitching tingle on his skin that means someone's watching him. Sean is laying it out. All his cards, so to speak, are on the table.

Dominic sent Sean to stop Lando. Sean doesn't know if Dominic's all right. And nothing would make Sean happier than to walk away from the Royale with Lando by his side and no blood spilled on the smooth, weathered oak boards of the porch.

Sinclair's shirtfront has become crumpled and sweaty in Lando's grip, and when he turns his eyes back to Sinclair's face, he's scowling fiercely at Lando. The flicker of uncertainty still lingers in his eyes, but he knows what Lando knows.

The fact that Lando hadn't killed him already means that he hasn't quite come to terms with the consequences of such a killing. Such a murder. Lando isn't as willing to let Yuma go as he had tried to convince himself he was. He isn't willing to let Dominic go.

He isn't willing to let Cate go.

No matter how foolish -- and it is abysmally foolish, recklessly, dangerously foolish and _selfish_ \-- Lando isn't willing to let _himself_ go.

Lando only exists in Yuma. With Cate.

Elsewhere he is other men with other agendas, men he sometimes dislikes and sometimes outright hates.

And if he kills Sinclair, he really is -- as he had briefly thought himself to be as he walked the path that led him here -- done.

But leaving this porch, leaving Sinclair alive, will be viewed -- by Sinclair and his men, at least -- as a sign of weakness. It _is_ a sign of weakness, of course, and Lando... _Julien_... can't afford such a thing in Yuma. It's one of the foundations that Cate's livelihood is founded on. To undermine it would be to set her up for a fall, and Lando can't -- _won't_ \-- do that.

So. He glances at Sean for a moment, thoughtful. Sean's gaze flicks to the hand that's holding the knife at Sinclair's throat -- the tip once more merely grazing his skin, rather than jabbed into it -- and then back to Lando, and it's clear that Sean understands that Lando isn't going to kill Sinclair. Not today at any rate. There is a slight lessening in the tension of his arm -- which must be killing him at this point, his gun is bloody enormous -- and the deep creases around his eyes and mouth become shallower, less set. It gives the impression that Sean has smiled even though his expression hasn't actually changed.

So. Lando cannot kill Sinclair without consequences he now deems to be unacceptable, but neither can he leave this porch without demonstrating that he -- and by extension Cate -- are not to be trifled with.

So be it.

There is something else, there is _one_ thing, that Lando can do (maybe something that he can't _not_ do) even if the day has to end with Harry Sinclair still alive and actively plotting Lando's death. A thing that will make _Dominic_ as untouchable as Sinclair himself.

He pulls the blade away from Sinclair's bloody neck and sets the man carefully, slowly away from himself, keeping the knife well clear of Sinclair, away from Lando's own body and in a loose, relaxed grip. Sinclair steps back until he's the width of the porch away from Lando, his hand going at once to his throat, his mouth already open to deliver what Lando is certain will be a tedious and self-important harangue in the direction of the Sheriff, likely demanding that Lando be arrested immediately, or possibly gunned down in the street like a dog.

Lando has no fear of that, but he can't imagine listening to Sinclair spout bloated threats, either, so he snarls: "Don't push me, monsieur, for your very life. This knife," and he twirls it between his fingers, a flashy -- and probably unnerving, since the blade is stained with Sinclair's blood -- demonstration that Lando doesn't often give into the temptation to indulge in, "has already tasted your blood, and I doubt not that spilling the rest would please it, as well as me, endlessly."

"Shut it, Sinclair," Sean agrees firmly, and for a wonder, Sinclair does. "Let's go," Sean tells Lando, jerking his head in the direction of the jailhouse, but making no move to reholster his pistol, Lando is pleased to see.

He is counting on that gun, on Sean himself.

"A moment, if you please," Lando says, but without looking at Sean and without giving him the chance to object. "I have something to say to Monsieur Eades." Lando takes only a single step forward, but George Eades's hand falls to the butt of his pistol, his knuckles practically glowing white under the tanned skin of his hand. Lando is almost disappointed when Sean's Deputy -- Jude -- doesn't shoot Eades as directed, but he's not surprised.

Lando, when he wishes to, has an extremely penetrating speaking voice. He doesn't use it often. He's found that speaking quietly when he's deeply serious is usually more effective than booming at people. He makes this one of the rare exceptions. He wants everyone within sight to hear him.

"The next time you proposition young Dominic, Monsieur Eades, and he refuses you, I suggest you consider simply directing your unwanted affections..." he looks pointedly at Reedus, brows arched insinuatingly, "elsewhere. If you ever so much as lay a finger on Dominic again, I assure you, I will slice you into pieces too small for even your own mother to identify."

Lando knows before the threat even leaves his tongue that it's not necessary. The insinuation will be enough for a man like Eades (whose face had gone plum colored and mottled), the humiliation will be enough, and he turns away with every confidence that Eades will not be capable of letting it stand, and every intention of not lifting a finger to defend himself.

Lando is looking straight at Sean when he leaves his back to Eades; Sean's eyes are hooded, and the western sun throws rugged shadows across his face. _Give me a reason to trust you_ , Lando thinks, and takes a step toward Sean, listening for the sound of Eades's gun leaving its holster.

Sometimes Sean thinks there's something inside that he's missing. He can very faintly remember what it was for the word 'murder' or 'killing' to send a penny-dreadful shiver down his spine, but he lost that somewhere between Sheffield and

here

and in the instant that Eades angles his elbow enough for the motion to be considered a commitment to drawing his gun, Sean swings the Smith and Wesson up and in his direction. There's no decision to fire, just the silk-smooth action of the trigger under his finger and Sean doesn't actually hear the roar of the shot. Eades's throat explodes in blood and gray cartilage.

Julien blinks, and takes another even step that takes him past Sean.

There's a little rag of acrid smoke curling away on the almost still air, and the ring of the spent cartridge on the porch floor.

Eades falls, and the sound is wet and weighty.

"Jesus Jesus!" Reedus is saying, wiping at his blood-spattered face with blood-spattered hands.

Jude makes an angry sound, disgusted at himself for hesitating when Sean had already given him his instructions. Reedus interprets the noise as criticism and hastily puts his hands up in a gesture of surrender.

"Jesus! I'm not doin' anything," he says in panic.

Julien's walking slowly down the steps. Sean looks at Harry.

"It passed you by today," Sean says darkly. "Don't give it any call to come back for you."

Harry's face tightens, and Sean almost expects him to start up again, but Harry's also breathing hard and unevenly and his face is almost as gray as Eades's.

Sean lets the connection of their eyes stand for a few more seconds, long enough to impress on Harry that Sean and Julien are _leaving_ rather than _retreating_. Then Sean backs up a step or two and turns around and follows Julien. The skin between Sean's shoulder blades itches, half-anticipating a bullet in the back, but it never comes.

Sean thinks wryly that this may be the first time he's ever put himself in the position where a bullet in the back was a real possibility. Bloody Frog nonsense is starting to rub off on him.

Jude lopes to catch up.

"Shit, sorry Boss, I should have nailed him when he put his hand on his gun."

"You did fine," Sean says, and he's able to infuse some warmth into his voice because even though he's not pleased at Jude crapping out on an explicit instruction, Sean's glad he got to do Eades himself.

Sean lengthens his stride to bring himself level with Julien as they walk the few blocks back to the jailhouse.

Lando is intensely aware of Sean’s deputy -- Jude – ambling along beside them. His stride is every bit as long as Sean’s or Lando’s, but he’s moving at a kind of staggering half-lope (walk, walk, _jog_ , walk, walk, _jog_ ) to keep up with them.

Lando suspects Jude isn’t quite as eager to get out of the bloody line of fire as both Lando and Sean are. Inexperienced enough to want to hang about and see.

It’s enough to make Lando feel faintly ill.

The nausea by no means overwhelms his distinct pleasure at killing George Eades.

Sean had pulled the trigger, of course, and Lando has no doubt that if anyone were to ask, the Sheriff would take full responsibility for the man’s death. Sean’d had Eades dead to rights. The man was pulling a gun in a situation in which he was warned not once, but _twice_ to be still and shut up. Nobody in their right mind would blame the Sheriff, including -- if Lando is any judge of people, and he _is_ \-- Sean himself.

Nevertheless, Lando is quite clear on who killed George Eades.

It’s possible that there will be some guilt over that later. He knows himself well enough to understand that he’s awfully good at putting off contemplating such things until it’s stored up enough bile and self-loathing to shatter his sleep into oblivion. But at the moment, there’s nothing but satisfaction at the understanding of what he’d done.

The same could be said for Sean’s involvement. Later, Lando may have some serious guilt over setting Sean up that way.

Right now, though, walking beside Sean with the smell of gunpowder still simmering softly off of his gun and buzzing in Lando’s nostrils, Lando is just fine with it.

Cate told him once that he was smart enough to get away with most anything, but didn’t that also give him an obligation _not_ to get away with some things?

Lando suspects strongly that Cate would consider this particular set of circumstances as falling under that category.

And Lando doesn’t give a damn.

He’s alive. His position in Yuma is pretty much unchanged.

Sinclair is alive, too, and that’s unfortunate, but no different than it was before. And Lando can live with it, for the moment.

There’ll be time to remedy that later, and for now, at least, Dominic won’t have to worry about a repeat of the incident.

Lando realizes he and Sean haven’t yet said anything to one another, not since Sean had shot a man to keep him from shooting Lando in the back (never mind the deliberate orchestration of that event, it’s immaterial). Thanks, Lando thinks, are probably in order.

“Nice shot, Sheriff,” he says, and glances over at Sean, unsmiling.

“At twenty feet?” Sean says, keeping his gaze resolutely straight ahead. “That’s not a shot. A shot’s a hundred and fifty yards, before the sun’s really up, with a thirty year old carbine you know sights a little bit off to the left. You hit a man in the throat like that … that’s a nice shot.”

“Any shot that prevents _me_ getting shot is a good shot, Sean, regardless of distance," Julien observes, tone simultaneously wry and brittle.

Sean narrows his eyes.

“Point four-four at twenty feet? I’m surprised it didn’t bleedin’ decapitate him.”

Sean's mouth quirks, and Julien’s eyes take light, and then Sean’s laughing. Not because it’s funny, or he’s happy, but because his nerves are springing back from the tension now. Christ. That could have gone wrong in so very many ways, and at least half of them would have resulted in Sean being killed by the very same long lanky eejit who’s walking beside him and hacking out a dry laugh of his own.

They walk on a little further in silence, until Sean, voicing aloud the tail-end of a conversation he’s having with himself, says

“Thing is, Sinclair’s that kind’a dog. He’s had a fright now, and he’ll think on that for a while. But sooner or later he’ll forget. He won’t let this rest forever.”

Julien ducks his head away.

“I know,” he says evenly.

“Lookit. I’d been tryin’ to stay clear of him, same as you, but that’s torn it. I’m in the shite right along next of yeh now.”

Julien looks at Sean, the hard edges and cold lights returning to his face, but Sean shakes his head and smiles.

“I’m just sayin’,” he husks, “Harry Sinclair’s my problem too, now, at any road. Whatever happens, we’ll deal wi’it.”

Julien’s expression softens a little, and he looks away again and nods emphatically, but doesn’t answer.

Sean snorts in amusement, winning a sharp glance from Julien.

“Jesus. The look on his face was priceless though. Sweatin’ like a bloody pig,” Sean says by way of explanation.

Julien grins, all white teeth and black eyes.

But before they have time to really savor the recollection, they’re on the street across from the jailhouse. Ewan’s leaning over Dominic - who’s slouched in one of the wooden chairs on the porch - with a tin cup in his hand. Julien breaks away from Sean and runs the last twenty yards.

The scab on Dominic’s lip has broken open and is bleeding. Lando wonders grimly how many times a day that happens as he drops into a crouch in front of Dominic’s chair, barely noticing as Sean’s other deputy backs hastily out of his way.

Dominic clutches at Lando’s wrist, the tips of his fingers biting painfully into thin skin, but Lando doesn’t pull away. He’d sooner cut off his own hand. Dominic’s looking at him with full eyes, wide and bright and the color of mist.

 _Fear and grief make Dominic’s eyes pale_ , Lando thinks, feeling almost numb at the relief and bright, pale _devotion_ in Dominic’s eyes. “It’s fine,” Lando says, keeping his voice as soft and calm as he can. “Everything’s fine, Dominic.”

Dominic’s eyes shift to a point behind Lando, probably Sean. A sideways flicker of Lando’s gaze reveals that Sean, the brim of his hat as wide as a sombrero in the shadow he's throwing across the boards, is giving Dominic a nod. Dominic looks back at Lando and nods as well, once. He opens his mouth to say something, and then winces abruptly.

Lando guesses he must be feeling the sting of his split lip finally, and before he thinks about it Lando has Julien’s handkerchief out and is dabbing carefully at it. Dominic’s hand finally loosens from around Lando’s wrist, and fumbles to take the handkerchief.

Lando lets him have it.

He’s unprepared when Dominic falls bonelessly forward, slumping against Lando’s chest and making him rock back precariously on his heels for a moment. A hand -- Sean's, of course -- closes around Lando’s shoulder, steadies him for a moment, and then releases him.

Lando slides a hand up between Dominic’s shoulder blades and presses it there, feeling Dominic shake silently while he presses his brow to Lando’s collarbone, both of Dominic's hands grasping frantically at Lando's shoulders.

Sean doesn’t say anything, but both his deputies breeze by Lando and go inside the jail house without a word.

“Come, Dominique,” Lando murmurs, letting his lips brush against Dominic’s temple, and to hell with what Sean thinks of it, what the whole bloody town thinks of it. “Let’s get you home before Cate comes looking for us both.”

He has to support most of their combined weight when Lando hauls Dominic to his feet, and Dominic’s face crumples slightly in pain, the hand holding the bloody handkerchief in it clutching instinctively at his ribs.

Lando tilts his face away from Dominic deliberately, unsure – for the first time in _years_ \-- that he’ll be able to conceal what he's thinking.

He isn’t surprised to find himself looking into Sean’s face (which is deeply flushed, and he doesn't seem to be able to meet Lando's eyes for more than a second, for which Lando can only feel grateful), but he has nothing to say about it either. He merely nods once, jaw tight, and levers himself up under one of Dominic's arms in preparation for the walk back to Cate's.

They take it slow, Sean and Julien matching their pace and the degree to which they take Dominic's weight with remarkable efficiency. Sean and Julien are pretty much of a height; Sean's more heavily built, but Julien's got more than enough strength in his whipcord frame to take his share of Dominic's slighter body.

Dominic's struggling, hitching little sounds of pain deep in his chest and clenching his hands into fists on Sean and Julien's shoulders. Julien's talking to Dominic, a constant stream of soft nonsense that Sean's not sure is even English. When Sean steals a sideways glimpse at them he sees Julien's face in three-quarter profile, chin dipped slightly, and eyes almost black with some excess of emotion that Sean declines to name to himself.

Sean fixes his gaze on the next few feet, the next few yards of street. The people they pass draw back in silence, perplexed and curious. Dominic stumbles a little, and despite his own best efforts, Sean looks down and somehow the spread of Julien's brown fingers in the folds of Dominic's indigo-dyed shirt, curving around Dominic's ribcage, is more than Sean wants to know.

"Vas bien," Julien says to Dominic, smiling despite the pinched look to the corners of his eyes.

Dominic nods fiercely, and Sean sees with relief that they only have another half-block to go.

One of the girls – Jewel, Sean thinks her name is, nice young thing with golden brown hair and big blue-green eyes – is standing on the house porch, hanging over the railing and scanning the street. When she sees them, she turns and – though they're still too far away to make out the actual words – it's clear she calls to someone inside.

Liv emerges from the house, stops to stare, and then picks up her skirts and jumps down the porch steps and runs at them.

"Jesus, Dominic," she cries, her voice shrill enough with fright to make Sean wince.

"Heya," Dominic says, his bright tone rather undermined by the sudden bout of coughing that shakes through him.

"Julien," Liv says, more in control of herself, and she puts her hand on the arm he's not using to support Dominic.

"Allons," Julien says, glancing in obvious concern at Dominic.

Liv steps aside, letting them pass, and then circles round to come up beside Sean. He glances at her, reluctantly allowing himself to understand that the way her eyes are burning big and dark in her too white face means she's frightened, and relieved, and a little confused.

"Aye," he says, which admittedly isn't particularly enlightening for her, but how would he even begin to explain this whole bleedin' mess to a woman anyway? She'll probably just clock him one or have a cryin' fit because he didn't let Julien get killed defending Dominic's honor, or some shite like that.

"Where is..." Lando begins, but he lets the words die in his throat when he glances up and sees Cate standing there. His mind does a sort of sideways _slide_ , rendering him momentarily dizzy, and for a moment memory is so strong that he actually _sees_ her doubled, sees her as she is now, hair in loose coils at the base of her neck, dress steel-grey, face pale and eyes red-rimmed, and as she _was_ , hair escaped from the tight upsweep to curl in tendrils around her pale, pale face, bruised cheek, blood on her dress.

Only her eyes are the same. The eyes of a woman who has been weeping near-ceaselessly, helplessly, hopelessly.

"Cate," he says, and she says nothing. She stands perfectly still, her hands clasped together tightly in the folds of her skirts, and closes her eyes so tightly that her pale, graceful brows furrow fiercely, her expression tensely desperate, as though she's convinced that when she opens her eyes they (he)(Dominic) will be gone. "Mon coeur," Lando murmurs hoarsely, fighting against the swell of grief and guilt in his chest to get the words out.

Her eyes snap wide and lock with his, brilliantly blue, and Lando bites down on the words that want to roll off his tongue ( _Je t'aime, mon amour, as much as Dominic, I swear it can't you_ see _that?_ ).

Lando is not a coward, but he turns away.

He turns to Jewel and bites out a sharp command to fetch the doctor (he doesn't realize until he's stopped speaking that it was half in French, and no one could be more surprised by that than Lando himself), ignoring the startled look she throws in his direction.

"We should get him into bed," Liv says, and Lando nods, pathetically grateful to her (though he doesn't look too closely at why). Sean moves as if to continue with Dominic slung between them, but Lando doesn't think he can stand to hear Dominic groan from between clenched teeth with every step he forces himself to take.

He waves Sean away.

"Merci beaucoup, Sheriff, but I will take him from here."

He swings Dominic up into his arms as one might a woman, a new bride -- a thing he would have never done to Dominic in the street, for all to see -- and it doesn't take as long as Lando expects to adjust to Dominic's bulk. He's lost weight, likely just since his injuries.

He sets his jaw and carries Dominic toward the stairs, stepping past Cate without looking at her.


	7. Escape: Sean, Lando, Yuma, September, 1880

He thinks that it should become easier, at some point. Or if not easier, at least more comfortable.

He remembers what it's like to be easy with another person, with Bills, and he thinks -- in a blurry kind of way, the edges of it rounded and softened by the whiskey he's taken from behind the bar at Cate's -- that's a damned funny thing, considering how things turned out between him and Bills.

Things were almost easy with Cate, once, but it's so distant and skewed with other things, vicious events that have irrevocably changed them both and their manner with one another... Lando can hardly recall what it was like.

Now it’s all too common for them to argue –- if it could even be called that –- as they did today, over Dominic’s still, sleeping body. They fight without heat, Cate’s voice nearly as smooth and calm as her face. The woman who knows his name and the man who knows _him_ are both out of his reach, lost to him. And there is nothing to be done about it.

But Lando can only take so much of Dominic's pale, strained face -- even asleep with a belly full of laudnum to dull the pain, his face had been grey and almost waxy -- and the way the girls moved around Lando in wide circles, alternately gazing pityingly and visibly trying to work up the nerve to come and comfort him. He can only take so much of Cate's silence, as though she has no more to say, as though the hurried, harried words exchanged in Dominic's bedroom had actually been anything that remotely resembled "talking," as though they had conveyed information, as though they had, either of them, said anything _real_.

No one tried to stop him when he took the bottle from behind the bar -- the good whiskey, smooth and rich, which he once shared with Dominic -- and left Cate's, feeling coiled and tense with fury and worry and unreleased and unrealized potential violence.

That’s what sends him to the Sheriff's office, where Jude, his feet propped up on Sean's desk in the Sheriff's absence, scrambles madly to get to his feet as Lando breezes past him, headed for the cells.

There’s nowhere else he can go and safely get piss drunk, and nowhere at all he can be safe and be _himself_ , but this is the best he can do. No one will bother him here, and in the end that's nearly as good as being safe, even if he must trade the comfortable chairs of Cate's parlor for the cool, hard metal of the tiny bunk.

 _At least_ , he thinks, taking another slug of whiskey directly from the bottle, feeling it burn down his throat and warm his belly, _it's cool in here_.

Sean's idling a few minutes away in the cook shop, having finished his meal, when a small boy appears at his elbow with eyes round from the weighty responsibility of carrying a message to the sheriff. Not only has Sean the glamour of his office, but he's very tall and he talks funny.

"What do you want, yeh little beggar?"

"Please, Deputy Law said to say there's a Frenchman in the jail drinking whiskey and he won't leave and he's getting drunk and you'd give me a nickel if I came quick and said it all right."

Sean laughs.

"A Frenchman? Well, that's worth a dime, then."

He tosses a couple of quarters on the table to cover the cost of his food, and flips a dime into the gleeful child's cupped hands.

Sean saunters the couple of blocks back to the jail. Jude's hovering in the front room, and when he sees Sean he looks both relieved and somewhat embarrassed.

"Sorry Boss, I didn't know what to do. He won't leave, but he's not violent or anything."

"Yet," Sean amends. "Go on, get outta here, I'll deal wi' him."

Jude grabs his hat and departs before Sean changes his mind.

Sean walks down the narrow hallway, past two empty cells and one occupied by a vagrant sleeping the sleep of the just and already dead drunk.

"Despite appearances, this is not in fact a drinking emporium," Sean says, leaning in the open doorway of the cell.

Julien holds out a three-quarters full bottle of premium whiskey.

"Are you going to criticize, or drink?" he demands.

Sean scratches his ear.

"Aye. Well. If them's the choices, I suppose I'll have a drink."

He takes the bottle from Julien and takes a pull, hissing through his teeth at the rich burn of the spirit as it goes down his throat to land in a molten pool in his belly.

"That's good stuff."

"Behind the bar," Lando tells him with a nod. "You can get Farrell to pour it, if he likes you well enough, but you're better off stealing it." He takes a drink himself. "As I did."

He's not sure, come to think about it, if he wanted Sean to show up or stay away. Lando licks at his bottom lip, tasting whiskey, and tips his head back against the wall. He's got one foot cocked up on the edge of the bunk and his coat is hanging on his knee.

"Pull up a piece of bunk, mon homme," he drawls, and waves a languid invitation. "I have determined that this bottle of whiskey has delivered me grievous and unforgivable insult, and it must be destroyed."

He cocks a brow at Sean, who looks as though he isn't sure whether to be amused or wary, and offers the bottle. "Since my earlier attempts at vengeance came to naught, I feel I've the right to this small piece of..." he smirks, "justice by proxy."

Sean hesitates for another second at the depth of bleak bitterness in Julien's voice. But he knows this, knows the strange empty let down when you don't kill a man, just as well as he knows the oily unsettled satisfaction when you do.

He finally accepts the bottle, takes another slug, and returns it to Julien. Sean sits down next to him, pulling his own hat off. He beats it on his knee a bit and then chucks it onto the foot of the bunk. He leans back until his head and shoulders are against the rough brick wall behind.

"How's Dominic doin'?" he asks, pulling out a cigarette and offering it to Julien.

Julien nods, not quite steadily, and exhales hard, and takes the cigarette.

"He's… he'll be all right, it seems. The doctor said… "

He trails off, leaning in to let Sean light his cigarette off the same match that Sean's just used for his own smoke.

"Yeah, he'll do alright," Sean says encouragingly. "I know his breed. Tough little fuckers every one."

Julien laughs, or rather he breathes out in a way that might convey amusement if it weren't for almost fevered burn of his eyes and the sour twist of his mouth.

"You did all right," Sean says, when Julien tilts the bottle to his mouth again and swallows, and swallows. "You didn't solve it, but you scared the shit outta Sinclair and he won't forget that for a while. In the meantime, look on the bright side – maybe he'll drop dead one o' these days wi'out any help from you. Go at young Elijah too hard and bust a blood vessel or something. Yeh never know. Good things happen all the time."

"Elijah, heh," Lando says. "Petite gosse, he will surprise Sinclair one day, I think."

He looks at Sean, who's got his head cocked curiously. Sean, Lando notices, has a face that's all angles, a nose that shows evidence of having been broken many times, and eyes that skirt the edges of the room just as often as Lando's do. The suspicious sort, and they have that much in common.

"Elijah is l'individu a impliqué, Sean," Lando tells him, aware that he's just drunk enough to be telling the actual truth, and just sober enough to be glad it's about nothing more incriminating than Elijah. "He is wholly and completely in it for his own sake, his own pleasure, his own extrémités. A man like that--" Sean's brows shoot upward in surprise, and Lando sees his lips curling already, the corners of his eyes crinkling, "-- a _man_ ," he insists, "like that is rarely content to spend his life bowing to the whims of another."

He tilts the bottle and takes several long, painful, satisfying gulps of what feels a great deal like fire. "He will bide with Harry Sinclair until his désirs diverge from Sinclair's path, and then..." He shrugs bonelessly, finally feeling relaxed, and grins at Sean.

"He is a viper in waiting, voyez-vous?"

"Aye, well, a viper, I'll grant you that part," Sean says, taking the bottle out of Julien's hand and taking a couple of long pulls at it himself for fear of getting left too far behind. "Jesus, you've this worse than half gone. Was this full when you started?"

Julien nods weightily.

"You're goin' teh regret this in the morning."

"I'm going to regret tout que - _everything_ \- in the morning," Julien says, and there's a softened edge of his words that's just drunken slur and nothing to do with his native tongue. "C'est mon – my – fatalité. _Fate_. Ce n'est pas?"

"Aye," Sean says decisively, having lost track of the content of that statement several interlocutions back and feeling a certain fuzzy warmth seeping around the edges of his own brain now.

"D'accord," Julien says with great energy, sloshing the last couple of inches of whiskey around in the bottle.

"Him too," Sean says, taking the bottle back and doing away with a sizeable fraction of the contents. "Hold this," he says, shoving it back at Julien, "I've one almost as good as that in my desk."

He pushes up onto his feet, and sways a little.

"Oops," he observes, rather astutely. "I think I'm drunk."

Lando smirks at the slow sway of Sean's body and the clear surprise in his eyes at finding himself weaving as he moves toward the desk. "Do you really?" he asks, and Sean makes the mistake of throwing a look at Lando over his shoulder, which makes him stagger and bump his hip against his desk.

"Bugger," Sean snarls, and Lando laughs, the first genuine one he can recall in the recent past. "Shut it, yeh bloody Frog," Sean grumbles, which only provokes further laughter from Lando.

"Forgive me, s'il te plait, mon homme," Lando manages between guffaws. "When you are drinking, you are nearly painfully English."

Sean, having recovered his bottle of whiskey and in the process of making his unsteady way back to the cells, pauses. He points an unsteady finger at Lando, the other fingers of that hand curled around the neck of the bottle, and glowers in a not-even-faintly formidable fashion. "You should talk, fer Christ's sake," he says, and rolls his eyes expressively heavenward. "D'yeh even know yeh’re not talking English?"

"Non plus," Julien protests, lifting his whiskey bottle in an answering gesture. "It is you qui ne - who are not speaking French."

Sean hitches his finger again, preparatory to some devastating comeback, but he can't think of one so he shrugs and comes back into the cell and drops back onto the bunk next to Julien. They solemnly clink the necks of the two bottles together in a salute.

"A les ennemies anciennes," Julien intones solemnly. “A l'Angleterre, et la France."

"I'll drink to that, since I don't know what all you just said," Sean says, and they both do.

"I said," Julien says, "may our two great nations continue to enjoy the cordiale relationship that has existed for so… many years."

Sean stares, and then laughs. Julien smirks, and has another drink.

"I knew a French girl once," Sean says, settling himself more comfortably. "LouLou, her name was. Wore very fancy drawers."

Julien, in mid slug, laughs and produces a small amount of whiskey out of his nose.

Sean laughs too.

"Well, I were very young. Things like that made a big impression. Women didn't wear drawers much in those days – it were near before you were born. I don't think I'd ever seen drawers on a woman before her."

Julien's sliding – physically and metaphorically – into a hysterical heap on the bunk.

"It's not _that_ funny," San manages to say before he dissolves into laughter.

Sean isn't one of those men that look younger than they are when they laugh (Lando is and always has been one of those, which is why Julien only smirks, never laughs).

Sean has lines around his eyes and mouth, and they groove deeply into existence when he laughs, bisecting cheeks with deep lines a shade or two paler than his tanned skin. He throws his head back, though, baring his throat and openly delighted, and he may not _look_ younger, but he _sounds_ it. The rough, deep rasp of his voice translates into a surprisingly pleasant laughing rumble, and Lando has never wondered before how he sounds himself when he laughs. Now is not the time to wonder, as he can hardly hear himself over the boom of Sean, and he closes his eyes for a moment to let himself feel the sound of it, not bright, but deep and uncomplicated.

He opens them because Sean nudges him with his mostly full bottle. "Don't fall asleep, yeh girl," he half-grins, half-slurs, and Lando snorts mirth and disgust in equal measures.

He learned to drink with Bill Boyd, and the chances of him falling asleep before Sean are between slim and none, thanks.

"I assure you, my good Sheriff, that I've hours of drunken revelry yet left in me," he says solemnly, which sets Sean to laughing again. Lando drags every ounce of Julien's aristocratic disdain about himself like a mantle, and sneers (though the corners of his lips still want to curl upward in a grin, and that feels like more than a miracle to him at this point), "You will see, mon ami. Think of me as a boy all you like, _old man_ ; it does me no harm and you no good. I will drink you under this bunk, and you will bemoan your aching head and sour stomach tomorrow. In this, your age is only to your détriment."

He arches both brows and tips his bottle up to prove his point only to find that he's emptied it sometime in the last few minutes and has only just notice.

Sean is laughing so hard that his bottle is tilting dangerously on his knee, his long, tanned fingers still secure around the neck (for the moment). "Aye, yeh showed me," he gasps, wiping at his eyes.

"Shut it, yeh sorry slag," Lando growls deeply, his voice dropping into the range of Sean's own, sliding smoothly and easily around the rough northern accent. "I'll leave yeh laughin' from teh other side o' yer bleeding face, yeh daft sod." He exaggerates the language deliberately, making it almost a parody, complete with foul verbiage, but he still wonders if perhaps he hasn't made a mistake at the brief widening of Sean’s eyes.

Then Sean doubles over, the base of the bottle sliding off his supporting knee, but still clenched in his hand, so safe enough for that, laughing so hard it's a nearly soundless wheeze. "God, man, that's _terrible_ ," he gasps, face beet red with laughter. "Never do that again!"

"Crétin," Lando sniffs, and takes advantage of Sean's apparently apoplectic mirth to steal his bottle.

Sean lets the bottle go without protest. Julien's right enough that his age is with him in this particular endeavor. Sean's been a hard and capable drinker all his adult life, but he's eased back in recent years. More to do with encroaching good sense than loss of capacity, but still, an aching head and sour stomach seem a good deal less tolerable at forty-four than they did at twenty. Julien's overlooked one factor in his calculations, however, which is that he started drinking a good deal earlier than Sean, and now he's monopolizing the remaining bottle. Sean doesn't doubt that he's got a good way to go yet, but he also doesn't doubt Julien's going to get there and then some.

Sean's feeling pretty damn good himself. It's been a good long time since he felt quite this drunk – no – relaxed. Drunk, too.

"Gimme that," he says, and grabs the bottle back from Julien.

Julien looks surprised, and faintly annoyed at his own fingers, as if he expected them to put up more of a fight and they just let him down. Sean takes a drink, and then another, and shoves the bottle back into Julien's hand. Julien looks surprised all over again.

Sean wipes his hand down over his face and starts laughing at absolutely nothing. Julien looks very grim, and has a drink, and starts laughing too.

"Tu es – you are – tres comique," Julien says.

Sean can tell that Julien's cockeyed drunk at this point because there's something so wide open and raw and shining about him, and he looks like he doesn't have a care in the world.

Their laughter subsides, both of them slumping back on the bunk, occasionally hiccupping little sounds of weary amusement. Sean rummages for another couple of smokes, but Julien sort of flat-hands him on the pocket and shakes his head.

"Non, non, allow me," he says, rifling thorough his coat with a lot of energy and very little direction until he finds his cigarette case. He smoothes his coat carefully before dumping it on the floor.

"Alors," he says grandly, snapping the case open under Sean's nose with enough vigor to startle Sean.

"Gracias," Sean says in his abominable accent, and delicately picks out a cigarette.

Lando picks up one of his own, taking a moment to walk it idly through his fingers -- which, drunk or not, is as easy as it ever is -- before sliding it between his lips.

"Tha's bloody good," Sean says, and Lando can't tell if he's talking about the first drag off his smoke or Lando's parlor trick, so he merely nods slightly, leaning in to light his own smoke and ignoring the way the room goes faintly unsteady with the small motion of his head. Sean shakes out the match and flicks it away, and Lando shifts so that his back is against the wall again, but he's facing Sean this time, still with one foot propped up on the bunk.

Sean's battered Stetson has received a bit of a relocation -- most likely when Sean had gone to retrieve the second bottle, and is now wedged at the foot of the bunk between the chain that holds the metal shelf to the wall and Sean's heavily muscled thigh. Lando regards the hat thoughtfully, his thoughts hazy and sluggish, curious as to how long Sean has had it. The hat looks older than God, actually, and more poorly used than any article of clothing ought to.

 _Poor thing ought to be retired_ , he thinks, but apparently he didn't just think it, he actually said it, because Sean looks at him crookedly, one eye squinted against the smoke from his cigarette.

"What?" Sean says, frowning. "Me?"

Lando laughs, genuinely amused at Sean's frowning truculence. "Non, mon homme," he assures Sean, and gestures toward the Stetson. "Votre chapeau, your hat. It has... what is it you cowboys say, eh? It has been ridden hard and put away wet, oui?"

Sean's brows draw together in an expression of wounded offense so genuine that Lando honestly can't laugh; it's too funny, but the sound sticks in his throat, too big to emerge. "Non, mon ami, paix," he says, holding out both hands in a surrender gesture, look, open hands, no threat here. "Peace, Sean, I take it back. Your hat is not a battered and squashed and mostly shapeless hunk of felt. It is quite handsome; it has character and great value. I admire it immensely."

Sean snorts and makes a rude gesture, and Lando grins.

"You have had it forever, oui?" Lando asks, abruptly and irrepressibly curious. While drunk, he is much as he had been as a young man, utterly and completely unable to resist asking any and every question that enters his head. "Since before Prosperous, where you were famous local law?”

Famous?" Sean laughs, "is that what they're callin' it?"

But his gaze softens – actually softens – as he retrieves his hat from where it's ended up, and beats the dents out of it and then recreases the crown again. Sean doesn't see it, but Julien's smirk becomes a smile, gentle and genuine, at the way Sean caresses the faded felt brim.

"I bought this hat on the second of July, eighteen sixty nine, in the General Outfitters Store in Chicago. It cost me two dollars and seventy five cents, and I had to borrow fifty cents of that off a fella what sold food pails to the railroad workers."

Sean sits up enough to put the hat on his head, and his eyes almost close, and he's once again in the gloomy clutter of the supply store, with the clamor of the rail yard outside and the Chinese pail seller tugging at his sleeve and warning him that the shrill whistle outside is the signal that their train is leaving again, and Sean staring at himself in the glass and pulling the brim of the beautiful glossy black Stetson down onto his brows.

"I was thirty-three years old," Sean says, taking his hat off so he can lean back again, but this time he sets it in his lap so he can pet it like a small animal. "So you've time yet. You may yet find a hat half as good as this."

Julien sort of laughs sort of sputters sort of shrugs in a gesture that's wholly French.

"That hat," Sean says, gesturing with it at Julien, "has never been to a wedding. Of any kind. At all."

He claps the hat back into his lap, and looks very triumphant.

“Ah bon?" Lando asks, grinning at Sean's lopsided look of triumph. "No weddings at all? Ever?"

Sean gives him a sour look and another two fingered obscenity, and takes a long pull off the bottle, as if for punctuation.

"Opposé to weddings, eh, Sheriff?" he asks, but doesn't really want or expect an answer. Sean makes an indeterminate grunt as Lando nicks his bottle and throws back a swallow, and then returns it to Sean's unresisting fingers. "I am not a man for weddings myself," he says, and tips his head back and closes his eyes. The warmth in his belly has radiated outward, the way that alcohol induced relaxation always does, eventually, filling his arms and legs with gentle, comforting heat and lethargy. His head is buzzing pleasantly, and he understands that this sense of well-being is false, deliberately induced and in no way real, but that doesn't matter.

You make your own happiness, after all, and there are worse things than spending an evening getting pissed with Sean, whom he likes more than he wants to, and fears less than he ought to.

"A man like me... well, variété is my bread and butter, non? What would I do with a wife?"

For a moment, he has the unlikely image of Cate in a wedding gown, yards of lace and silk, and in this impossible imagining, she is smiling and happy. There is nothing calm or neutral about her face; it is all burned away by the warm regard in her eyes, and when he imagines himself into the unlikely scene, her body is warm and soft against his and she smiles like sunshine on his face.

"And Cate," he says, and then stops, because while he isn't sure what he'd meant to say about Cate there, he is sure he hadn't meant to say it aloud.

Sean is looking at him, neither smiling nor frowning, just listening, and Lando doesn't know what to do with that for long moments. It's been too many years since someone looked at him like that, open and without judgment, willing to listen but without pressure or insistence. Has anyone _ever_ looked at him like that?

"She would not have me," he hears himself say slowly. "Even without... the... complication that is Dominic, Cate... She never really trusts a man, no matter how much of himself he is willing to give."

"Well," Sean says, commandeering the bottle out of Julien's hand again. "It's not like women ever really _trust_ men, as such, is it? I mean, it's not like we're particularly trustworthy, are we?"

Sean takes a drink.

"No. No, we're not," Julien says, his voice soft and bleak and almost dying into silence.

"Oh, see," Sean says. "This is the trouble wi' you bloody foreigners, oh yeh can drink alright, but then yeh get all bleedin' maudlin and philosophical."

Julien sparks, a short laugh arching his spine.

"Unlike you Englishmen, who become unconscious."

"There's no reasonin' about women," Sean says, ignoring this latest insult to his race. "They want what they want, and it's not in men's natures to do it."

"To do what?" Julien asks, and there's a soft sleepy something happening around his eyes.

"Stay home, give them babies, don't track a mess in on yer boots," Sean smiles.

Julien laughs slackly, like it's too much effort, but then he sits up straighter and takes the bottle back.

"For all your remarkable wisdom about women, mon homme," he says between slugs of whiskey, "I note there is no Madam Sheriff."

"That's why," Sean snorts. "My remarkable bloody wisdom. Three wives is … "

He trails off, and smiles sheepishly, incapable of thinking of anything to stick after that that could be construed as a non-incriminating statement.

Lando's not so drunk that he doesn't understand that Sean's likely cursing his own drink-loosened tongue. For a moment, Lando can think of nothing to say, nothing that might let them pass it off as a jest (as Sean's dismay at letting it slip is far more telling than the admission itself), but his brain is slow and fuzzy with drink.

Julien, however, apparently doesn't suffer the wit-dulling effects of too much drink, or perhaps Lando is just used to responding automatically with that wit; he's half-amused and half-appalled to find himself smirking, dark and heated and nearly flirtatious (oh hell and damn, he'll likely regret _this_ in the morning).

"Détendez, mon ami," he purrs, and tilts his head slightly. "Unless your indiscretions involved nineteen whores, a madam, and a piano player, my love life is still infinitely more complicated than anything you can lay claim to."

He leans back against the wall again, sprawling in a way that Julien would never allow himself to do (even this intoxicated, and it's a pleasure to discard that for the moment and just _be_ ), and smirks. "I would place large sums of money on the fact that you can only wistfully _aspire_ to the complication that is my life, mon bon ami."

Sean looks momentarily nonplussed, and then his face creases abruptly and completely, a precursor to that full, deep laughter that involves Sean's whole body, head thrown back (and Dominic's slight fascination with Sean Bean becomes a bit easier for Lando to understand every time the man laughs, though the Sheriff is admittedly not at all Lando's type, which tends toward short, lithe, and only two men on the bloody planet, it seems), and Lando laughs with him, happy enough, for the moment, to just have salvaged this interesting camaraderie from the previous moment of awkwardness.

"God, yeh're right," Sean says when he can get enough breath to do so. "Compared to you, I'm practically continent."

That sets the two of them off again, Julien nearly slithering off the bunk and having to scramble himself back up, and Sean slapping his own leg in complete hysteria.

"Oh, bloody women," Sean laughs, when they've got themselves together enough to pass the bottle back and forth. "And men," he amends, lifting the bottle in salute to Julien.

Julien makes a breathy noise indicative of amused self-deprecation. Sean heaves a huge breath, trying to steady himself again.

"Still, y'know, what's life without some bloody grievance, right?"

Julien looks at him, not smiling, just looking, like he doesn't much mind what comes out of Sean's mouth now as long they can stay comfortably slumped here with the bottle going back and forth between them every few minutes.

"Everybody's got a bloody saga," Sean says.

Naturellement," Lando says, with a slight incline of his head that causes cunning little lines of light to trace the edges of his vision. "C'est la vie, Sean, and nothing to be done but take what it gives you--" he grins broadly, the kind of smile reserved normally for a vicious bluff or a straight flush, "--and wager everything you have that you can beat it, ne trouves-tu pas?"

"Ain't that the God's own truth," Sean mutters, and raises the bottle in Lando's direction again before tipping it back and swallowing for several seconds put together.

There are several minutes of comfortable silence punctuated by the occasional request for the bottle and Lando murmuring thanks in French, and Lando feels no real need to fill it. Sean seems to concur, as the silence spins out, warm and soft-edged, until Lando finally says, "I will, I think, require the use of your cell, mon homme."

Sean cocks his head questioningly, and Lando watches his eyes lose focus for a second, as though the movement dislocated Sean's eyeballs momentarily. He bites back the urge to snicker, intending to nod. Instead he merely blinks once and smiles blurrily.

"If I go home like this, Cate will skin me with her tongue."

He hesitates for a moment, then grins. "And trust me, that is nowhere near as pleasant as it sounds."

"Oh God, aye, you don't hafta teh tell me," Sean says, making several semi successful attempts to get off the bunk. "I bet that one can scrape paint wi' a word."

"Comme ca?" Julien laughs, unfolding into the space Sean's vacated.

"I'll have someone run round and tell 'em you're all right, shall I?" Sean says, swaying hectically as he tries to pull the thin gray blanket up on Julien.

"Quel bon mari tu es," Julien mumbles into the mattress.

"Did you just call me Mary, y'bleeder?" Sean laughs.

"Husband," Julien says. "What a good husband."

"Enough bloody practice," Sean snorts.

He pats Julien on the head, eliciting a moan of annoyance.

"Sleep tight," Sean says, staggering a little.

Julien gusts into laughter again.

"Shh," Sean says severely, and Julien, for no apparent reason, obeys and subsides into sleepy murmurs.


	8. Purgatory: Lando, Cate, Yuma, September 1880

The distance between the jail and Cate’s house is around four hundred and fifty yards. On a good day, Lando can cover it in far less than a minute, and be barely winded for the exertion.

The morning after he nearly kills Harry Sinclair, it takes him twenty minutes and two rest stops.

He doesn’t get drunk often.

He drinks regularly, but he can count the number of times he’s been honestly drunk on the fingers of both hands. It’s too dangerous, but the real truth of it is he has very few good memories of being drunk, and too many bitter ones.

So he doesn’t drink often, and he doesn’t deal with the repercussions with any kind of equanimity.

His head feels as though it’s swelled to at least twice its normal size, and his eyes are burnt into his skull. His whole body is slow and unresponsive, and his blood is pounding distressingly in his temples. He stops in front of the general store, half convinced he’s going to pass out, and leans against the hitching post until Keira, the owner’s daughter, comes out to offer him a glass of water and inquire about his health.

He takes the water and drinks it down, assures her that he is quite well – a blatant lie, which she responds to with a knowing look, but no real censure – and decides not to inquire about whether her father is inside the store. Doubtless she would not have been allowed outside while he lurked there, had that been the case. She gives him a brightly guileless smile at his thanks, and it occurs to him that Julien would not miss this opportunity to flirt with a girl like her, sweet and proper and fresh as a daisy, if for no other reason than to see her blush.

He considers it for a long moment, but he just can’t be arsed.

Reaching for Julien’s turn of phrase is far too much work, and there’s no one but her around to hear it. Instead, he gives her a real smile and a nod of thanks, and turns to make his slow, painful way up the street.

He feels her watching his back for the next ten yards or so (which take him around five minutes to cover), but apparently she gets bored with his slow, unsteady progress and goes inside.

Lando sighs and considers closing his eyes and making his way there through memory. The sun is too bloody bright and too bloody hot, and he’s slept in his shirt (on the hard and thoroughly uncomfortable bunk in the cell), so it’s sticking to him in the most disgusting manner possible. He’s starting to wish he’d stayed put until mid-afternoon roused him with hunger, but Jude pounding around in the outer office with the clear intention of waking Lando drove him into the cruelly desolate street with the world’s most devastating hangover. He considers telling Sean on Jude. Then he decides it’s too far to bother with, and Sean would likely only yell at him for waking him to a hangover at least as horrific as Lando’s.

Ten minutes, two hundred yards, and forty-seven expletives (in four languages) later, he stubs his toe on the steps of Cate’s porch.

“Bugger,” he whimpers.

Forty-eight.

He negotiates the steps with all the grace and agility of an eighty year-old man, grateful beyond all measure that the parlor won’t be in use at this hour, and he can drag himself under the piano and pass out for the next four hours. He isn’t up to the stairs, either to Dominic’s room or to Cate’s, let alone to the decision he’d have to make regarding which of them to go to.

The truth is, Lando could hardly have picked a worse moment to come home.

When Sean’s messenger turned up near midnight saying that Julien was ‘in the jailhouse’, Cate’s first reaction was blank horror under an icily perfect manner. It was only long moments later that she registered the phrase ‘dead drunk’ and the fact that the message came from the Sheriff, not Lando himself.

Sometime after the relief wore off, about two minutes later, Cate felt the hot swell of indignation under her breastbone. As the long restless hours of the night and the following morning passed, she progressed from there to outright anger (How could Lando be so stupid?) and on to dread (God alone knew what he’d say in that condition – Lando drank plenty in the house but he’d never been _drunk_ ) and from there to pure fury (How could he be so _callous_ as to put her through this?).

Unfortunately, it is at this precise point that Cate, ostensibly surveying the front parlor with a view to rearranging the furniture, but in reality just pacing out her ill-temper, glances out through the still half-closed drapes and sees Lando leaning heavily on the upper newel post of the front porch steps.

Cate feels the sharp clean pain of relief in her chest, and she’s out of the parlor and through the front hall before she really has time to realize that she’s moving. She throws the front door open, and for a second it’s enough that he’s here and alive.

Her heart’s too well-schooled in the stutter and stop that answers the way he’s half folded against the porch rail, his right arm loosely curled around his waist, his mouth half-open on a pained inhalation, his eyes narrowed. Cate takes a single quick step forwards, her hands outstretched, her gaze moving rapidly over him, looking for the horror of blood and bandage that marks the beginning of another battle for him.

He’s unhurt. He’s dead white, his eyes red-rimmed and a little swollen; his clothes are crumpled but clean and untorn. He reeks of whiskey – the sour, next-day smell of whiskey sweated out through a man’s skin.

Cate presses her hands down against her narrow skirts, her fingers fisting so tightly that her fingernails bite bright crescents of pain into her palms.

Lando, with almost preternatural misjudgment, smiles wanly at her.

“Good morning, Cate, ma cherie,” he says, his voice uncharacteristically husky and thin.

“I’m sorry, _monsieur_ ,” Cate says, her own voice almost glassine with cold fury, “but my house declines to serve _drunks_.”

She turns on her heel and strides – or as nearly as her tightly bustled skirts will allow – back into the house, slamming the front door behind her loudly enough to bring Sabine leaning over the banisters.

“What’s - ”

“Nothing!” Cate snaps. “Some drunken lout on my front porch.”

Sabine’s eyes go round and she hastily retreats, apparently warning off anyone else who’s curious enough to investigate the noise downstairs.

Lando winces at the slamming door, and then blinks at it, still vibrating in its frame, several times.

He has to admit, he hasn’t anticipated _that_.

He lets his weight rest fully on the rail for a long moment, pondering the logistics of the situation, but it’s really no use. He cannot manage more than two or three movement variations into the chess game that he and Cate continually engage in, no more than a few paltry steps into the “If I do this, she’ll do that and I’ll respond with this, but if she realizes I’ll respond with this, then she might do _that_ instead…” stream of reasoning. He is too tired, too hung-over, too heart-sore to fight with Cate.

 _If I go in, she’ll just have to deal with it,_ he thinks, and he’s sure she’s prepared to do so. She’s slammed the door practically in his face, but she hasn’t thrown the bolt, and she knows better than to think that a closed door will stop him.

He has nowhere else to go.

He crosses the three steps to the door and it pushes open freely under his hands.

“Cate,” he begins, eyeing her warily as she paces back and forth across the floor, shoes clicking in a disastrously loud fashion on the hard wood. He manages to repress a wince, and does not ask her to stop.

“What--” she snaps, whirling, and for a moment Lando thinks she’s responding to him, but then she continues (and he should have known better, really) with, “--could you have _possibly_ been thinking?”

The hardest part is that he understands. He knows why she’s angry, he believes she has every right, and it’s impossible to be righteously indignant in light of that. It’s equally impossible not to be aggravated, however; his aching head and sour stomach and generally uncomfortable body does not take his understanding into consideration. He clenches his back teeth, ignoring the flare of pain that sends from the hinge of his jaw around the back of his neck, and manages to say nothing.

Cate whirls on her heel, her mouth a tight line, but Lando sees that her eyes are still red from the night before. Some of his irritation subsides, but by no means all of it. She paces a quick, _tack-tack-tack_ tattoo across the floor, miserably loud in his ears, echoing off the walls of the empty (and apparently acoustically effective) room, her skirts flaring neatly as she turns to pace back.

“Cate,” he repeats, low and soft and as reasonable as he’s capable of making it when the sound of his own voice echoing in his head feels like razor wire scraping at his tender brain. “It’s fine. I did not give myself -- or _you_ \-- away. It is fine.”

Some bone-deep sense of self-preservation in Cate quells the temptation (and, God, what is about Lando that drives her to the temptation, when she’s always been coldly cerebral with other men?) to just haul back her hand and slap him across the face as hard as she can. Instead, she steps in close enough for her voice – pitched low but fervent – to convey clearly enough to him to make him wince.

“Oh, well, that’s all right then – I’m sure you’ve been in a condition to be an _excellent_ judge of proprieties all last night.”

Lando’s brows gather up anxiously, and if Cate could convince herself for one second that it was remorse, she’d lose the edge of her fury. But Cate knows that expression, even if she’s never seen it sour Lando’s features before.

“Julien La Fleur,” she says evenly, “so help me God if you get sick on my floor I’ll pack your bags and throw them out the _bloody window_.”

The enormity of Cate cursing apparently impresses Lando, because he visibly gathers himself together, lifting his chin and squaring his shoulders.

“Believe me,” Cate hisses, “I’m quite capable of as much self-control as you are _dead drunk_ , but I’ve made it clear to _him_ that he’s not welcome here. I’ve made it clear to everyone else in this house too – he’s not a friend, he’s not someone we can trust. It doesn’t have to be like that – not for me, Julien. I’m running a legitimate business here; I pay city taxes - _damn_ , I pay a subscription to the goddamn library. If he wanted to come here to see Liv, that’d suit me just fine. I can always use another friend with a badge and some say-so in this town. I’ve kept him at arm’s length for _you_ , because _you_ can’t afford to have him walking in and out of here anytime he feels like it.”

For a moment, Lando is too angry to speak. Irritation gives way to what is almost rage, albeit rage tinged with a kind of shocked, raw hurt. He turns his back on her, the tension stabbing between his shoulder blades like a red-hot railroad spike, and deliberately paces to the bar. He reaches over the top of the bar and behind it, recovers the bottle of good whiskey, flicks the cork out with one negligent motion, and drinks directly from the mouth.

He hears Cate behind him, but he doesn’t try to determine what her small sounds denote. He doesn’t want to know, doesn’t even care.

Several long, harsh swallows burn down his throat, and his belly settles immediately. The pounding rush of blood in his temples recedes, and he straightens and sets the bottle on the bar.

He turns to find her regarding him, her mouth slightly open, her cheeks bright with a furious flush. Her eyes flash –- Cate is the only woman he’s ever known who’s eyes actually do that -- and she opens her mouth to say something. Lando isn’t sure even she knows what.

It is a gunfight moment, and he’s never had such a thing with her. The roil of his belly and the thump of his head are gone, and his body is his own, his nerves singing alertly, his muscles tight and ready to respond to whatever he commands. Faintly, as though from outside himself, there is a tickle of regret, a kind of melancholy and fatalistic remorse.

Because there is no stopping it now. Whatever he wants, whatever _she_ wants, there is no stopping it now.

“Upstairs,” he says, and it is an unabashed command. She draws herself up to her full height – respectable, almost a match for his – but he doesn’t give her time to set herself.

He has one hand around her upper arm just above her elbow before she completes her indrawn breath, fingertips sunk deeply into the meat of her arm, because this is it, it is going to happen, and it is _imperative_ that it not happen _here_. He pushes her into a walk, which she adjusts to quickly, only a slight stumble at the suddenness of movement, and points her at the stairs, right beside her himself, his thigh brushing her skirts as they both rush headlong out of the too-public parlor.

“You!” she begins, her voice high and tight with fury, but he snarls,

“Not here, madame,” in his iciest tone.

Cate shrugs Lando off, wrenching her arm out of his grip, and he allows it not least because she’s moving as quickly as he could possibly wish, hurrying up the narrow back stairs.

There’s a furtive rustle of skirts as they turn the landing of the second floor, the whisper of doors easing shut, and Cate flashes a furious glance down the hallway, but there’s no one unwary enough to be caught eavesdropping.

Cate and Lando go up the second flight of stairs in charged silence, Cate leading the way into her rooms and then stepping aside to let Lando pass. When he’s in, Cate slams the door with deliberate relish. Lando actually flinches, but he recovers almost at once and shoots her a look of all too reasonable disapproval. But truthfully Cate couldn’t care less about being discreet just at this moment. Let the house know they’re fighting; presumably half the town already knows that Julien staggered home after a drunken night in jail. Let them think that’s only grounds Cate has for complaint – God knows, it would be enough if he really was her –

“It’s not that I care where you go or what you do or who you do it with,” Cate says in a rush. “But there’s no reason to take stupid _stupid_ risks like that. Even if you did manage to hold your tongue last night while you were – _in that condition_ \- why on earth would you put yourself in that position? In front of _him_ , of all people?”

Cate has a distant inkling that Lando might be letting her get this far not because he agrees or even lacks an answer, but because he’s letting her dig herself in good and deep before he kicks the dirt in on top of her. But that awareness is slight indeed when set against the acrid stink of alcohol filling Cate’s nostrils, and the galling sense that she’s put herself at a disadvantage with regard to Sean, and Lando doesn’t even notice or appreciate that she’s done it for his sake.

Cate’s known a thousand men just like Sean; she can read him inside out and wrong side up. He’s self-centered and callous and eminently _manageable_ in a way that Lando is not, never has been and never will be. Cate has lavished uncharacteristic amounts of work and worry on Lando, and it’s infuriating to find herself reduced to the trite drama of reproaching him for drunkenness or stupidity or a thousand other mundane transgressions, none of which she would have believed him capable of even twenty-four hours ago.

Lando lets her get it out, as there’s no point to attempting reason while she’s so riled. Her sidebar is right there, and while there isn’t a big selection, it suits his purposes. He upends one of the fine crystal tumblers and pours himself a generous slug of brandy while she rants. He has no intention of getting drunk again, but at the moment, it’s the only way he has of taking the edge off the repercussions of the night before.

He swallows a mouthful of soothing fire, and turns to regard her archly, aware that his entire attitude will only goad her further into anger, but it’s all too familiar, too easy, too _natural_ to him, to let his opponent make their own bed, to use whatever he sees to undo them, and he doesn’t try to stop himself.

“I was in no danger from Sean last night,” he says simply, and she stiffens from head to toe. He can see the outburst trembling on her tongue, and he’s glad his headache is on (temporary, unfortunately) hiatus. “Sean was in the same condition, and for the same reasons. The risk was necessary, inasmuch as any risk ever is.”

The outright disbelief on her face is enough to make him grit his teeth, but he’s not particularly surprised by it. Of course she doesn’t understand. Of course she doesn’t, and he really doesn’t want her to ever understand what it takes to pull oneself back from a killing rage.

He has other outlets, or had in the past, but they were unavailable to him last night ( _she_ was unavailable to him, _Dominic_ was unavailable to him, and while the two of them don’t soothe him in the same way, they are ones he turns to when he needs soothing), and he had done what he had to do.

“I have never told you not to cultivate Sean’s friendship, Cate,” he says softly. Which is completely true, but he has always been aware of her avoidance of him, and the reasons behind it, and he has never told her it wasn’t necessary either. And it is unfair of him to use it against her, yes, but he does. He does, because in moments like these, you always do. You use whatever comes to hand, and wield it as a weapon.

And he is only now beginning to recognize that it probably isn’t necessary to keep Sean away, that Sean, whatever else he is, is not a man inclined to dig into another man’s sordid past unless it intrudes into the present in such a way that it upsets the quality of life of those Sean is meant to protect. How could he have known? How could she?

“And I will remove myself from your house and your responsibility the instant you ask it of me.” His tone is cool and polite and utterly bland, and he means it, but it’s like cutting his own throat. He will bleed, whether she sends him packing or not.

He will bleed, because she has never before indicated that she might want him gone from her life, and he has never wanted to go. He’s frequently told himself he _should_ go, that it would be best for both of them, but he has never wanted it, has never known her to want it.

And needing her undoes him, as it always does, as it had last night, when he had known that he couldn’t go to her when he needed soothing, that her hurt over Dominic and her fear would not allow it. But he will never tell her that he had killed most of two bottles of good whiskey because he knew she was not his to turn to. He has no right to accuse, he has no right to expect it, no matter that she has been that for him before.

He has no rights to her at all, and he’s still himself enough, in spite of the crisp, unnatural stillness of his mind and his hands, not to be as vicious as he could be.

For a moment Cate is suffused with a fury that’s almost indistinguishable from utter peace – a fury so clean and complete that it hollows her out from throat to belly, leaving her heart and breath standing motionless in her chest. Cate feels her body slacken, her features falling into the easy composure of sleep. Of death.

 _Then go_. The words are lying on her tongue, cool and curved yet somehow painfully edged. _If it means so little to you to stay, then go_.

No, he didn’t ask her to keep Sean at arm’s length. He didn’t ask her to take him in every time he rode into Yuma, half-fainting in his saddle, blood blackening a bit of torn cloth bound around a filthy wound, and fever making him half-crazy. He’s never said

 _Harbor me, Cate. Help me. Heal me._

He’s never submitted himself to _asking_ her for anything. He’s never had to, because somehow he – his blood and bones, his breath, his brown eyes – are enough to fill Cate with proprietary passion. She’s fought death for him and won, and every time she wins that battle she’s less inclined to lose next time. Cate _owns_ Lando; she’s paid for him in sweat and sleeplessness nights and small annoyances that tick through her fingers like nickels and dimes.

Except that Lando doesn’t feel the weight of her ownership. Lando – cold-eyed, hard-faced, even-voiced – doesn’t feel _anything_. There’s a whip-lick of pain in Cate’s guts at that realization, and her glassine fury gives way to a twisting burning anger.

He didn’t ask her to do these things.

 _Liar._

He’s asked her, with fever-cracked breath that shaped just her name like a lick of flame.

He’s asked her, with his blood-grimed fingers twisted into the folds of her nightgown as he struggled up from the grip of a nightmare.

He’s asked her, with the weight of his head on her shoulder and the wire-tight tension of his body slowly unraveling while she simply stands and breathes and strokes the floss of hair curling over his collar.

Cate’s vision swims, and when she blinks something red hot and salt heavy spills over her eyelashes and spatters against her upper lip and the bare skin of her collarbone.

“Don’t you _dare_ ,” she says, and her voice is horribly thick and liquid. “Don’t you dare act like - ”

She catches herself, literally splaying her fingers over her open mouth for a moment to hold the words back.

“If you leave,” she says, and she’s wretchedly aware that the fever-flood on her cheeks must be tears, “you’ll break Dominic’s heart.”

 _But not yours,_ he spits, but only in his mind, and turns away from her tears. He cannot face them the way he can face her rage, even if they are tears spawned of rage. It doesn’t matter, they are tears on her face, and he suspects she would be furious to know that her tears soften him when her words can’t.

 _Typical man,_ she would say, and she would be right.

So he turns away, holding his temper with both hands, and banishes the sight of her wet cheeks from his mind, forces back both fury and guilt, forces himself to be still.

“Given my choice,” he manages, and does fine up to the word ‘choice’, upon which his voice breaks like the word was made of sharp rocks and razors. He stops, swallows brandy, and sees how his fingers look around the glass, white-knuckled, the tendons in the backs of his hand standing out in vivid ropes. He puts the glass carefully on the sideboard and steps away, but he doesn’t turn to face her.

 _If I ever leave here,_ he thinks, caught for a moment in a quiet pocket of his own mind, _I will do my damnedest to take Dominic with me._

The thought is there and then gone a moment later, acknowledged as simple truth, but dismissed for now, not something he can truly consider (or say, for God’s sake, she would literally _shoot_ him) now, when it isn’t Dominic he’s losing.

“Given my choice,” he repeats, and it comes this time, if perhaps a little hoarsely, “I would _never_ leave. But it isn’t my choice, Cate. It’s yours. It’s always been yours.”

He turns, finally, because tears or not, he needs to see her.

“I would never leave _you_ \--” he says, and it’s the best he can do without crossing lines Cate will never let him cross, will never cross _with_ him (and perhaps it is too late, now, for either of them to choose to do so, perhaps Dominic makes it too late, and he doesn’t know how he feels about that, doesn’t know how to untangle the knot that twists in his chest from that possibility that is almost a certainty), “--unless I had to.”

She says nothing, and for a moment he cannot read her. She is blank to him in a way she never is, in spite of her cool exterior, and he thinks it’s not that she isn’t giving him anything, but that _he_ can’t bear to know, can’t bear to see it coming, whatever it might be.

“You got drunk with the _Sheriff_ ,” Cate says, and she’s suddenly weary with the tawdry domesticity of this argument and horribly tempted to just laugh at them both.

She turns away, her shoulders slack with a loss of tension, and gives vent to a wordless sound of frustration and exasperation.

“He could have killed me,” Lando says, and it’s like her exhaustion is infectious. He feels the sudden weight of it settle on his shoulders, and an instant before it happens, he braces himself for the return of the headache.

He isn’t disappointed. The spike of pain that pierces his left temple is so sharp it makes him momentarily nauseous.

“He would have been within his rights. I had my knife at Sinclair’s throat, he was dead with a flick of my wrist, and Sean…”

He shakes his head.

“He shot George Eades. Eades…” he twists his lips into smile of sorts. “He pulled his gun when I walked away. Sean killed him.”

The sudden ache is back in his chest, the knowledge that he’d manipulated Sean heavy and cold in his belly, and he turns back to the brandy and does away with the rest of the glass.

“I couldn’t come back here the way I was, Cate. It wouldn’t have been… You wouldn’t have wanted to see… that.”

Cate turns sharply to face him, so distracted by his words that she doesn’t notice herself lifting the heel of her right hand and wiping her cheek dry.

For a second she’s caught in the tangle of _Harry_ and _Lando’s knife_ and _Eades_ and _a gun_ and _shot him_ , and the cold contraction of fear in her guts is momentarily too sharp to breathe around.

But then she focuses on the phrase _you wouldn’t have wanted to see that_.

She’s seen Lando bloodied and beaten; she’s seen him hurt and haunted, she’s seen him wear the face of a nightmare thing. He might flinch away under her eyes, under her hands, but he lets her see. The idea that there is another face – another _Lando_ \- that he couldn’t show her …

Not for the first time, Cate feels the impotent frustration of a woman adrift in a man’s world. There are rules to this game that Cate can’t hope to comprehend, rules that encompass Sean’s excusing Lando’s putting a knife to Harry’s throat, and Sean’s killing Eades to save Lando’s life. Rules that make it somehow prudent and necessary for Lando spend the night dead drunk in a jail cell.

“I don’t understand you,” Cate says, the admission won from her by pure exasperation. “I don’t understand any of you.”

She turns away again, walking into her bedroom, skirting Lando’s saddle bags lying in the doorway with a couple of his shirts thrown over the top.

Cate makes an unconscious gesture of gathering up the loose tendrils of hair lying on the nape of her neck and twisting them up into the knot at the back of her head. She crosses to the dresser and fiddles with one of the shirt studs lying in the china dish that usually holds her hairpins.

“There’s no reason for you to go,” she says, without looking back at him. “Just … pick some of your things up, would you?”

“Yes,” he says, because what else can he say, really? And because he’s hurting and hung over and probably not thinking clearly, he adds, “don’t be angry with me.” He regrets it as soon as it’s out of his mouth – she goes very still, her hand hovering over the dish of her hairpins and his shirt studs, which co-exist in the cozy sort of cohabitation that he and Cate only attempt to give the impression of to others – but there’s nothing to be done about it. He sighs and rubs at his eyes, and then shoves curls of now too-oily hair off his forehead.

He hates sleeping with Julien’s pomade in his hair.

“I know what you do for me,” he murmurs, almost whispers. “I’ve always known.”

 _And I would have killed Sinclair for_ you _years ago, if you’d have let me,_ he thinks, but he can’t bring himself to say it. It’s almost an accusation, and he isn’t willing to make it. How can he blame her for this, for Dominic, for Harry’s boys, when her only crime is not wanting to be the cause of more bloodshed? Instead, he says, “Cate, I’ve always-”

“Don’t, Lando, just don’t,” Cate says, her voice even and steady, but also weighty with a simple appeal for mercy.

He nods. He’s not surprised.

She can’t see him standing as she is, but she seems to take his silence for assent, and her shoulders sag as the tension drains from them.

For a moment, he’s at a loss. His pounding head is back full force, brandy be damned, and he’d give nearly anything for a bath he isn’t willing to ask her to have prepared for him right now. He needs sleep, and she needs time, and one rather facilitates the other, so he lets it go.

Sometimes, as Lando had discovered early in his life, there is nothing to do but let go.

This, at least, isn’t the kind of letting go that precludes any kind of future for them, and never mind that it’s even less clear to him, now, what they could possibly manage.

Never mind. He’ll think about it later, he’ll think of something to do, something that will say the things she won’t let him tell her.

He walks to his saddlebags and scoops them up, ignoring the twinge in his shoulder, and hangs them neatly over the back of a chair. He hears her leave as he’s hanging his shirts in the cupboard, and he hates that he’s relieved at her absence.


	9. Ephemeral: Cate, Lando, Yuma, September, 1880

_Night._

The sound wakes Cate while the night is still deep dark. At first she thinks it's the wind, a soft steady sigh and a welcome coolness to the air. But as she comes further up out of dreams, she hears the little hissing edge to the sound, and then the unmistakable trickle of water on the eaves outside her window. She gasps softly, and pulls away from Lando’s arms.

Lando wakes too, stirring and sighing and opening his eyes all in a single motion. He catches hold of her wrist, and she can sense the tension springing into his body. They've been circling each other like cold-eyed fighters for days now; she's not surprised he's even more finely triggered than usual.

"It's raining," she says softly, pulling her hand away and slipping out of the bed.

She goes to the half-open window. Lando scrambles after her, coming to stand a little way behind her, and they both look out at the shining gauze of rain filling the night. After a moment Cate moves away. She picks up her wrapper and pulls it on, scooping the plait of her hair out of her collar. She goes out, into the sitting room, and from there out onto the landing. Lando grabs up his trousers from the chair and pulls them on, not bothering with a shirt or boots, doing up his buttons as he follows her downstairs.

The girls in their nightgowns are pale ghosts on the next landing down, some just emerging from their rooms, some hanging over the stairs, some already whispering and laughing quietly in the downstairs rooms. No one thinks to light a lamp or even a candle. Lando smiles greetings, feeling the touch of soft hands on his bare skin. He goes down, and sees that the front door is standing open.

He goes out onto the front porch. The air is cool and clean, and the rain comes down in perfectly straight and even bars of silver against the black of the night. Water arcs and piddles off every roof corner and porch and hitching post. The water trough in the street is brimming, the overflow falling in thin sheets over the sides.

The women stand transfixed, faces tilted upwards. On other porches, other townspeople have come out with robes or even coats over their night things. No one says anything, but there is a deep sense of connection, of camaraderie.

After a while, some of the girls begin to drift away again. Some wait longer, and then go. Cate is the last, the thin silk of her wrapper pulled tight around her as the chill seeps into her bones and she begins to shiver. Lando pushes away from the spot where he's been leaning for almost an hour.

"Come in," he murmurs, his hand covering the sharp curve of her right shoulder. "You're cold."

He almost expects resistance, but she turns at once and goes in. Lando closes and bolts the door, and follows her up. She's at the window again, and he tells her to go to bed. Once again, she obeys. But when they lie down and he takes her cold hands in his and chafes them warm, when he catches her feet between his, her eyes shine wide in the gloom. He puts his arms around her and pulls her close, and closes his eyes, but even as he slips into sleep again, he can feel the quiet rapture thrumming through her bow-strung body.

  
 _Day._

The next day, Lando gets up a little after one in the afternoon, washes and shaves and dresses, before leading the pale roan gelding down the street to the livery stable. There's a nice little buggy – little more than a dogcart, with high red lacquered wheels and a morocco leather bench seat – for hire. For another dollar, Lando could have the use of the stolid bay mare that pulls it, but Lando's got a theory about the roan that he wants to test out. And if he's right, the effect will beat the hell out of the bay.

Sure enough, the roan backs between the shafts like a dancer backing in the waltz. He tosses his head and snorfles at Lando, as much as to say "so, you _finally_ figured it out". He stands more placidly for Lando to arrange the harness traces than he ever did to have a saddle put on.

"All right," Lando says under his breath as he swings up onto the buggy seat and gathers the reins. "Let's see if you know your business after all."

The roan plunges his head and shakes his mane. Lando takes up the whip and twitches the reins, and the roan pulls off smoothly, neck arched and ears pricked in an attitude of self-satisfaction. Lando laughs, and the roan picks up his hooves and trots joyfully the few blocks back to Cate's.

Lando runs up the two flights of stairs to Cate's rooms.

"Put a dress on, I want to show you something outside," he says, breathless with excitement as much as exertion.

Cate's already in her chemise and corset, with her stockings on and her hair pinned up.

"What's going on?" she asks, half wary but reassured by his obvious delight.

"I want to show you something," he insists.

Cate, unsure whether to laugh or scold, lets herself be cajoled into putting on a print muslin afternoon dress, Lando doing her buttons up with much complaint about how numerous and how small they are.

"Gloves, and a hat," he says, as Cate's slipping her feet into her shoes.

"A _hat_?"

"You can't go out without a hat."

Ignoring the pile of smart bandboxes on top of Cate's bureau, Lando reaches down the big pale straw Leghorn with blue satin ribbons that she wears sitting on the back porch on sunny days.

"That old thing?" she protests. "I can't wear that around town."

"We're not going around town."

Consumed by curiosity, Cate accepts the hat and ties it on without further argument. She puts on a pair of short kid gloves. She's still buttoning them up when Lando takes her by the arm and steers her out.

"What's going on?" Liv asks, as they pass her on the landing.

"I don't know," Cate says helplessly.

"Parasol," Lando says, grabbing up Cate's cream silk one from the stand next to the front door.

Cate takes it, and lets him herd her out of the house.

"Oh my God," she says, halting. "It's a buggy. You got a buggy?"

"No, I rented a buggy," Lando corrects, taking his place at the buggy step and extending his hand to her.

"You made me put on a hat to show me a rented buggy?"

"The buggy's not the thing I want to show you," he says, shaking his head impatiently. "Come on."

Cate eyes him suspiciously, but she steps forward and takes his hand. She lifts her skirts with the other hand and sets her foot on the buggy step. Lando gives a nice steady strong boost with his hand and she springs up. She turns and sits down. Lando goes round to the other side and jumps up next to her.

He takes up the reins again and flips the whip at the roan.

"Make me proud, horse," he laughs.

The roan takes him at his word. They roll through Yuma swift and smooth as silk through Cate's fingers. Townspeople smile and nod at them, several very respectable citizens quite forgetting themselves and lifting their hats to a card shark and a madam.

Once they're clear of the town, Lando flips the whip again and the roan picks up the trot into a canter. Cate claps one hand on the crown of her hat and laughs at the exhilaration of flying along in the well-sprung buggy, with hardly a whiff of dust coming up off the still damp track. The roan is everything Lando could ask; sturdy and steady with a long smooth stride and a silky mouth that lets Lando guide him with hardly a flex of his fingers on the reins.

"Where are we going?" Cate asks, when Lando reins the roan in to a walk and turns him off the beaten track onto the scrub grass slope.

"Just over here," Lando says.

There's a line of broken rocks that Lando knows marks the margin of a small fall-away in the terrain, overlooking a wide shallow bowl-like depression in the earth. Lando walks the roan as close to the rocks as the buggy can easily go, and then reins in to a halt. The roan blows and tosses his head about, as if to say he's in no need of a breather. But when Lando drops the reins, he sets his hooves square and his head goes down and he starts pulling at the lush velvety grass tips that have sprung up since last night.

Lando goes round to Cate's side of the buggy and helps her down.

"Over here," he says, as Cate puts up her parasol and tips it onto her shoulder.

She takes his offered arm, and they walk together up the little rise to the rocks. As they draw near, Lando says

"close your eyes,"

and, for a wonder, Cate does.

He leads her forward to very edge of the fall, the earth spreading out below them and the breeze, still laden with the after-sweetness of the rain, ruffling her skirts and the long ribbons on her hat. Lando steps behind her and puts his hands on her shoulders.

"Look."

Cate opens her eyes. And gasps.

The desert is alive. Where there was dry dirt and rust wood bushes yesterday, today there is a field of flowers. The thin green stems and feathery leaves are like verdant mist lying close to the ground, and countless hundreds of thousands of blossoms – red and yellow and white and purple – dance and nod in the breeze. A thousand white butterflies flip and flutter and tumble among the flowers, like petals too ecstatic to be tethered to the earth.

Cate gasps again, and she turns her head to look at him in wonder and delight and utter gratitude.

"It's so beautiful," she says, and her voice is raw with threatening tears though her smile is wide and warm.

She darts her head back, staring, looking from horizon to horizon, and drinking it all in. And Lando, standing a breath away from her, lets his own gaze linger on the blush of her cheek, the breathless parting of her lips, the wave and flurry of a wayward tendril of blond hair against her ear.

"It won't last," he says quietly. "It'll be gone in a few days."

"It doesn't matter," Cate says at once. "It doesn't matter. It's so beautiful, it's worth it."

She doesn't look at him but her hand fumbles back among the folds of her skirts, and his reaches forward, and their fingers twine together and squeeze so tightly that they can both excuse to themselves the burning behind their eyes as they stare and stare.


	10. A Certain Breed: Sean, Lando, Dominic, Yuma, October, 1880

Sean pulls his split-skin gloves out of his coat pocket and draws them on. The sky is high blue, but there's an edge to the wind today, a promise of coming winter. He crosses the street, casting proprietary glances at every pedestrian and rider, every wagon and buggy, every storefront and house porch.

A young vaquero is having trouble managing his horse, a little yellow mare, who's sidling anxiously to avoid the scrawny dog circling almost underfoot and barking excitedly.

"Take her outta there," Sean calls.

The young rider, scowling in embarrassment, wheels his mount around in a tight circle and kicks her into an uneven trot towards the south end of the street.

"Shut up, yah mutt," Sean says, stooping to pick up a pebble from the dirt. He shies it at the hound, close enough to make it skitter and tuck its tail between its legs.

Sean turns away, looking over at Cate's and taking unconscious inventory of the drawn curtains and closed street-door. It's not much after noon; there's probably someone stirring inside, but it'll be a while before the house really begins its day. Sean scuffs his boots in the street and pats his pockets, looking for a smoke. Out of the corner of his eye he notices the vaquero trotting the little mare back up the street.

The dog explodes in a fury of barking, undercut by the too loud ring of harness and the boy's sharp cry of fear and the sudden violent rattle of a wagon's shafts and wheels. Sean turns, just in time to see

the dog shrieking with rage as it skitters and stamps in the dirt, fangs bared and tongue arched

the little mare rearing, her rider tipping back in his saddle, and their combined weight passing the pitch of balance, back, back, and the mare's rear hooves scrabble and flail and lose contact with the ground

and the wagon right behind them, the dray horse rolling its eyes and neighing and trying to back, but the wagon shafts twist a little and effectively jam up any retreat.

"NO!" Sean roars, as if he can dissuade gravity.

The mare falls, twisting as she does so, striking the dray horse side on with such violence that the whole wagon tilts and and then turns over, pitching the driver into the street and scattering bales and barrels. One horse whinnies; the other screams.

The wagon driver rolls and then kicks and crawls himself out of harm's way with enough energy to convince Sean that he's not badly hurt. The vaquero is making slower progress, dragging himself on both knees and one elbow. The mare is still down, but thrashing hard enough to reassure Sean. The dray is on its right side on the ground and –

Sean is already in the middle of the street when he sees enough to make him turn his head aside and catch his breath, swallowing back the sour spit filling his mouth.

The nearside shaft of the wagon is smashed, and a piece of wood as big around as Sean's upper arm is standing straight out from the animal's right back haunch, where the thick muscle runs down from the hipbone. A pool of black blood soaks the dirt beneath the animal's flank. The horse is rolling its eyes and blowing heavily, its neck stretched out and its whole body shuddering.

The dog, having been momentarily impressed by the noise of the crash, starts barking again. Sean picks up another stone – quite a bit bigger than the first – and lets lash with a true aim. The stone strikes the dog full on the ribs and sends it whimpering into the nearest alley.

Sean claps one hand over his mouth, and forces himself to keep moving, walking right up to the animals. The dray horse is a gelding, a big-boned bay with a black blaze on his face and amber brown eyes. Sean stifles a noise that's dangerously close to an angry sob.

Lando is sitting in the parlor rolling a smoke and listening to the girls twitter about upstairs ("Can I borrow that pink wrap Julien brought from San Francisco, Liv?" Annabelle wheedles; "If you spill anything on it, I swear, 'Bella, I'll strangle you with it!"), when he hears Sean shout.

It's an odd thing, that shout.

There's all sorts of noise outside in the street; it's noontime, and the streets are full of horses and people and wagons, and it all just merges into an ubiquitous background drone, totally outside of consciousness, until...

"NO!"

Lando hears that, understands it completely; it's a separate thing from the rest of the sounds from outside, and he's on his feet, half-rolled cigarette unraveled and tobacco strewn across the table top by his haste, and headed for the door before he wills it. His hand drops to his belt, finds sheathed knives, and tugs loose the bits of rawhide thong looped around the hilts to keep them secure, all without thought. When he opens the door it swings inward so hard it slams into the wall and sets the glasses behind the bar rattling.

 

He knows it was Sean's voice and he knows there were equal parts anger and dismay in it, and that's all he knows; he'll be damned if he understands why that's enough to send him outside with his eyes scanning the throng of people in the street and his shoulders tensed for a fight

Sean's hat is like a beacon, and Lando starts forward even as Sean barks -- "Get back, damn yeh, let me see," and a tiny increment of tension between Lando's shoulder blades subsides. Sean still sounds odd, almost unlike himself, but he doesn't seem to be in imminent danger, so that's something.

People fall back at Sean's command -- Lando doesn't blame them, he'd do the same (or perhaps not, since he's headed against the tide of the retreat) -- and Lando finally sees what the hell is going on.

There's an overturned wagon in the middle of the street. There's a horse on the ground as well -- no, two horses -- a big gelding that's blowing hard and straining to keep his head up off the ground, and a smaller one, a mare, Lando thinks, that doesn't seem to be hurt given the way she's already trying to get her feet under her. The bay... well, that's another story entirely. There's a chunk of wood that was probably once one of the shafts of the wagon jammed into his haunch on the right side, and even from a little ways off, Lando can see the blood.

Lando jogs past a bloke rising unsteadily to his feet with the aid of someone who hadn't been driven off by Sean's roar (the driver, Lando guesses, or maybe the rider of the mare) but Sean seems oblivious to him. The little mare manages to get her hooves under her, and she shakes her head and stamps, snorting several times, as though to clear her nose of dust.

 

Lando watches her for just a second longer, just long enough to be sure she's sound (someone steps in and catches her reins, leading her back out of the way), and then turns back to Sean.

 

As Lando watches, Sean drops to his knees in the dirt beside the bay and lays a hand on the animal's neck. The horse snorts and rolls his eyes toward Sean, and Sean strokes a hard, blunt hand along his neck soothingly. "There yeh are," Lando hears Sean murmur, little more than a whisper. "There's a fine fella."

Lando doesn't consider himself easily surprised, but for a moment, he stands there, still and silent, stunned.

Liv snaps him out of it, slamming out the front door of Cate's with enough noise to be forty drunken cowhands. "What happened?" she demands, almost shouting to be heard over the noise on the street, though she's only thirty feet away.

Lando doesn't bother to explain. Instead, he shouts back, "Get Dominic, Olivia. Now."

Liv doesn't hesitate, gone in a swirl of skirts the next second.

The muscles of the gelding's neck are stuttering under Sean's hand, a hectic tremor that turns Sean's stomach in its very wrongness. There's no place for a movement like that in an animal that's sound and whole.

"All right, all right," Sean says under his breath, and the words are intended to steady himself as much as the animal on the ground.

Sean runs his hand down to the gelding's shoulder, while he glances him over.

Get him up, is the first thought that forms in Sean's mind. A foundered horse will panic and thrash and make his injuries worse; getting the gelding onto his feet is the first step.

It's easier said than done though, because the animal's lying half across the unbroken side of the wagon shaft, and the traces and harness are now tangled hopelessly around the wreckage and the horse's forelimbs.

"Good lad," Sean says again, as he draws the thirteen inch Bowie knife he carries in a sheath tied to the back of his left thigh.

"Sean."

Sean looks up to find Julien standing over him, glancing from Sean to the gelding and back again with an expression of concern and … confusion?

For a second Sean has to struggle to meet Julien's eyes. Julien's sharp, and he's familiar with Sean's usual dryly-offhand demeanor. Sean knows all too well how easy, humiliatingly easy, he is for Julien to read right now.

"Sean?"

"We hafta get him up," Sean says gruffly, wiping the back of his hand across his nose. "Cut him outta his harness and get him up on his feet."

"Sean… laissez-lui," Julien says gently, and takes hold of Sean's shoulder. "Don't. It's… there's no point. Don't."

Sean jerks angrily, throwing Julien's hand off.

"If you're not gonna bloody help, then get out of the way," he snaps, his voice thickening.

He shifts his weight, bringing one knee down on the gelding's shoulder to pin it in place, and he fists up a mess of leather traces and hooks the blade of the Bowie under the loops. A swift strong flick of his wrist and the leather parts over the honed steel edge.

Julien moves closer. Sean looks up, blinking.

"Cut him out of the traces, and we'll get him up," he insists.

"Mon Dieu," Julien murmurs, stepping over broken planking to reach the gelding's hindquarters.

He stoops, holding his face half-averted as if the sight or smell of the blood and fresh manure are almost too much for him. He gathers up the stall-strap from where it's lying on the horse's flank, pulls out the knife hanging on his right hip, and cuts the leather.

Dominic decides to ignore the knock when it comes.

At least until after he's come. He stretches a little and lets out the breath he'd been holding, drawing another deep one and stroking himself a little faster. Julien didn't come to him last night, or the night previous to that, so to say that Dominic is wound a bit tight would be a sight more than a minor understatement. Especially after last night, with Julien sitting in the far corner with some of the girls, smoking and looking at him.

Dominic groans and his balls give a little tug: he's close.

There's a pounding on the door and Dominic squeezes his eyes shut, clinging to self-indulgence. Pounding, he thinks and his prick jerks. Julien got four fingers in him the night he rode back into town, and Dominic wanted to push it-- "Ah, fuck."

"Dom, I know you're in there!" The door actually shakes under Liv's fist and Dominic heaves a sigh, violently throwing himself off the bed and stalking naked to the door.

"Bleeding fuck, what?" He wrenches the door open and stops, because Liv's face looks a little pale, her whole body seems too tightly strung. "Oh, Christ, what?"

She crowds him into his room and he blushes a little at her skirts on his naked prick, cupping his palms over it as it softens.

Her lips quirk but her face still looks drawn. "Julien had me come get you. There's something going on outside, I couldn't see, but there was blood--"

Dominic is already hunting for his denims, for boots and he snaps his head up at her as he struggles into his trousers, fumbling the buttons. "He's not--" His voice gets caught and he has to clear his throat.

"No, no, Lord, I'm sorry. I don't know what it is, but you'd best hurry."

He can't be bothered with tiny buttons, so he pulls a sleeveless undershirt on, jamming his feet into the boots and trying to lace them and walk at the same time.

"Go," he urges when she hesitates at the door. "Fuck's sake, go! Tell them I'm coming."

She frowns. "If this weren't an emergency..." she says and hurries out. He can hear her shoes clattering down the stairs.

His heart is hammering when he drags the kit out from under his bed. The knives he had used on Julien years ago are still shiny and sharp and he tucks them into his belt. The worn leather bag is better stocked than it had been then, with actual tools for infection, bullets, burns, ones fit for humans, but his knives are... a little like luck.

He hopes he doesn't need it.

Lando clamps his teeth together and cuts whatever bits of leather come into his hands. He's actually more alarmed at Sean's clear distress (he's stroking the horse's neck again, his broad, blunt-fingered hands not quite steady, and talking gently to the gelding) than he is at the situation itself.

The situation isn't all that dire, frankly. It's a horse, not a man (not Sean) as Lando had feared when he first heard Sean's shout, and while Lando isn't exactly indifferent to the animal's pain, he's vividly aware that the situation could be a hell of a lot worse.

He glances up briefly, and Sean has his head dipped down, fingers stroking soothingly along the doomed gelding's neck; his voice is gruff and tight. Lando likes horses; he was born and raised on a bloody ranch, for God's sake, and he's spent his entire life working with them, caring for them. He knows when it's hopeless, or close enough. He also knows men, though, and Sean's face is clear enough to read even if Lando had never sat in a game of poker in his life.

Lando turns his attention back to the traces reluctantly (Sean's low, steady croon is almost painful).  
He's never been so glad to see anyone as he is to see Dominic skidding to a halt next to Sean, already dropping to his knees on the cracked and rutted dirt of the road, his eyes (dark and urgent) taking in the circumstances with quick, darting glances under furrowed brows, his lips folding down into a tense line of dismay and concentration.

Tell him, Dominic, Lando thinks; tell him it's no use, for God's sake.

Lando's throat feels tight, and he shakes his head sharply, as if to throw off distress that he's fairly sure he's merely absorbing from Sean.

Dominic doesn't tell him it's hopeless, though. Not at all.

He huffs out a big breath through his nose, and somehow it sounds both determined and regretful. "Maybe," is what he says, and then tips his head to look at Lando. Sean's face has gone stony and grim (with relief, Lando thinks, at having his hopes echoed by Dominic); Dominic just looks intently at Lando. "Get the rest of those fucking straps off 'im, what are you bloody waiting for?" he snaps.

And Lando hurries to obey.

Julien stands up and steps back, and Sean glances at him just long enough to see the look of shaken, half-sickened disbelief on his face. Sean grits his teeth and turns his head deliberately, looking at Dominic instead.

Dominic gestures to Julien.

"Get this out of the way, yeah?" Dominic says, indicating the broken bits of the wagon shaft lying in the way.

They pick up the bigger bits between them and sling them aside, and then Dominic kicks a few smaller pieces out of the way. Sean keeps running his hand gently along the gelding's neck, willing him to stay quiet, but there's an increasingly panicked quality to the animal's shudders.

"It needs to be now," Sean warns Dominic.

"Okay."

Dominic comes round to the horse's head again and crouches down. He twists the animal's forelock into his fist. Sean stands, stepping around horse and man, kicking more splintered wood out of his way until he's crouched next to the animal's shoulder on the other side. Sean eases his left knee under the gelding's withers.

"Julien, get at his hip there."

Julien looks like he wants to argue, so Sean narrows his eyes and grinds the instruction a second time.

"At his hip."

Julien takes a deep breath and takes up position.

"Okay, bonny boy," Dominic says, and he's grinning with determination. "Come on!"

He yanks on the horse's forelock and Sean shoulders into the animal's weight, and the gelding takes the instruction and the momentum of Sean's shove and twists himself upwards, trying to get a hoof under himself.

"Go on, yeh!" Sean barks, his boot heels smearing in the dirt as he struggles for enough traction to push again.

Julien snarls, and the gelding gets one hoof planted squarely. Dominic scrambles onto his feet, still holding the forelock.

"Come on - come on," he yells triumphantly.

Sean squeezes out the last ounce of breath from his lungs and the last particle of strength from his muscles. The gelding is front end up, but with an injured hindquarter he's having problems getting the rest of himself right. Sean glances aside to see Julien, teeth bared and tendons straining, pushing the animal full square by brute determination.

The gelding blows hard, really feeling his injury now that he's on his feet, but he finds his balance, one hind hoof delicately lifted, the other three steady and solid.

Dominic laughs, clawing his fingernails down the gelding's black face blaze. Sean rubs his hand across his face and smiles breathlessly. Julien is wiping his hands on the legs of his pants; he looks grim, and when his gaze snags on Sean's he turns his head away.

Dominic whispers nonsense to the gelding, cupping the animal's face in his hands, trying to stop his panicked eye-rolling. He hunches, pulls the horse's head down so they're eye to eye, and leans his forehead between the horse's ears.

"Sean," he says quietly, and gropes for the Sheriff's hand. His fingers hook into Sean's shirtfront, and Sean steps forward, grasping Dominic's fingers tight. "Hold his head, yeah? Keep eye contact so he has something to look at while I work."

Sean nods and they switch places. Sean's voice is hoarse with emotion and he strokes the gelding's mane firmly. The horse shifts his weight, settles again, and nudges his snout against Sean's face.

"Good," Dominic murmurs, and motions for Julien to get him his bag. His belly is twisted into knots. It's a good sign that the gelding is up on his feet, but it looks bad -- all that blood, staining the ground thick black.

"I've seen worse," he says, in answer to Julien's furrowed brow. He brushes his fingers against the back of Julien's hand and takes a deep breath. "Well, let's get to work then."

It's bad. It's worse than he'd thought. The smell of blood instantly floods Dominic's mouth, gets into his throat. He smoothes a hand along the gelding's flank, and the horse startles, steps high, tries to jerk his hindquarters away. He can hear Sean talking, "hush, hush, lad."

"Julien," Dominic puts out a palm. "There should be a wide, flat chiv in my bag. And a rag. There's so much blood..."

Julien puts the bag down after he's found the blade and stands behind Dominic, holding the blade while Dominic uses the rag to soak up the blood that's still dribbling down the gelding's flank. "What can I do?"

Dominic takes Julien's hand and puts int on the horse's leg, just below the piece of cart that's protruding from the leg. "Hold 'im here," he takes Julien's other hand and puts it on the horse's knee, "and here."

Julien nods.

"Got to get this out of here," Dominic says and tests how deep the slab of wood is. Again, the gelding jerks, whines, and Dominic looks down at Julien, who's settled on his haunches. "Hold him," Dominic says sharply and Julien nods, grits his teeth.

Dominic cuts into the flesh around the wood, then clamps the chiv between his teeth, pulls on the wood. It doesn't move. He holds his breath, pulls a little harder.

"What?"

Dominic pulls again, speaking through his teeth. "Embedded in the muscle, I think. Probably severed at least one." Suddenly it slips, pulls half out, and the gelding shrieks, tries to pull away, but Julien's grip on his knee and the severed muscle makes it impossible for him to replant his feet.

"Hold 'im!" Dominic yells and the gelding staggers. "Keep him up!"

"I have it!" Sean says sharply, and the gelding is breathing hard.

Another tug and the wood comes free. Blood instantly gushes from the wound, spills onto Dominic's shirt, his denims, streaks Julien's face and shirtfront.

"Okay, okay," Dominic whispers, and stuffs the rag into the wound. The blood keeps coming, thick and black like the blood on the ground and that's bad, that's bloody fucking bad, because it's blood from muscle and interior veins.

If he can't get the wound cleaned and closed....

"Water!" he shouts and someone shoves a pail into his hand. "Julien."

Julien keeps one hand on the horse and stands, wiping Dominic's sweaty hair back, matter-of-factly. "Here," he says and takes it, pouring water over the wound as Dominic sops at it. More blood and more, it's not stopping, and Dominic can see all the way to bone, can see slivers of wood and steel and the gelding whines weakly.

Julien keeps pouring until Dominic puts a hand on his arm, turning to look up at him.

Lando stops as soon as Dominic's hand touches his arm. He keeps his face absolutely still as he turns toward Dominic; he already knows what Dominic will say. He's known since he saw the wound. He's learned to recognize death, after all. Sean's voice is a rumble of background noise, too soft to decipher, but ever-present.

Dominic's eyes are thunderheads, his mouth bracketed with deep lines of discontent. He opens his lips, but then just licks them, and closes his eyes tight for a moment.

"It has to be done," Lando says. His voice sounds utterly bland to his own ears, except for the deeper than usual hills and valleys of Julien's accent, and he's glad.

They cannot all three succumb to the despair he can see flickering in the depths of Dominic's eyes.

Someone has to do what's necessary.

It's just a horse, Lando thinks.

He nods once and passes the bucket to Dominic (still trying without hope, Lando notes, to stall the tide of blood down the gelding's flank). He half wants to touch Dominic's hand that rests on Lando's arm, offer a moment of comfort. Instead, he slides his arm out from beneath that hand and circles around Dominic.

Dominic isn't the one that needs succor; Sean is the only one of them with a gun, and a gun is the best way. A knife is too messy and uncertain on an animal this large, and Lando doesn't have it in him to stretch the gelding's dying out any longer than they already have.

"Sean," he says, closing the distance between them, and Sean's head snaps up, eyes bright and furious. His fingers roll into fists against the gelding's neck; Lando sees bits of coarse mane threaded through Sean's fingers, dark beside his bleached-bone knuckles.

"No," Sean says, his face all bunched muscles and tightly drawn angles, his light eyes blazing. "No bloody way."

"Mon homme," Lando says gently, softly now that he's standing only inches from Sean, speaking almost in a whisper. "Mon ami, he is done. Don't hold him suffering here."

The gelding, as if in agreement, lets out a whinny that is more air than sound. What sound there is, though, is a sound of suffering, and Lando's hand rises of it's own accord to stroke a silky ear, the only comfort he can manage.

Sean can feel the change in the gelding, the slack tremble where muscles and sinews should be strung tight.

"Sean," Dominic says very gently. "Do it now, before he goes down again."

Sean nods, but more to acknowledge that he hears Dominic than to convey any real understanding. Julien steps away. The gelding shivers, lowering his head until the coarse strands of his mane pull free from between Sean's fingers.

Sean drops his left hand to his hip and draws the revolver on that side. Funny, it's been years since he noticed how heavy the break-tops are, how much of an effort of will it is to pull the weight clear of the holster.

Sean raises the revolver, steps around so that he's facing the horse sideways on, and aims the muzzle just above the animal's left eye.

Squeeze the trigger, he tells himself. Just squeeze the bloody trigger.

He can't. He physically cannot.

Julien's hand slides weightless and warm over Sean's.

"Laissez," Julien breathes.

Sean turns his head to meet Julien's almost ebony stare.

Julien doesn't even blink.

Sean lets the revolver go, lets Julien take it from him. Sean steps away a single pace, and Julien moves in, swift and sure. Julien's hands are finer than Sean's, but his fingers are long and strong enough to span the hammer and trigger of the gun comfortably. He tips the revolver, pulling the hammer back, and Sean forces himself to concentrate on how the gun must feel in Julien's grip, how smooth and cool the polished steel is under his fingertips.

How easily the curved trigger fits behind the first joint of his index finger.

How fluidly the trigger comes back and

the shot explodes in a flash of sound and smoke.

Sean cries out, a harsh guttural sound of dismay.

The gelding folds, and drops into the dirt.

Catherine had a stallion that she'd taught to 'play dead', and he didn't go down any easier or more gracefully than that. But he'd never let his head hit the dirt quite so solidly. He'd never lie quite so still and slack.

Julien turns, and offers the revolver to Sean, grip first.

"Merci."

Sean mishears the word as English, and nods grudgingly.

"Aye, I know it was."

Lando doesn't bother to correct Sean.

He is sickened and exhausted, and it isn't even noon yet. This is the first time he's fired a pistol in more than six years.

It had felt terrifyingly, familiarly comfortable.

He nods to Sean, and then to Dominic (courtesy, courtesy, he thinks, holding onto Julien and his manners and his posture by sheer force of will), but he can't quite unlock the muscles of his jaw and he can still hear the roar of the gun in his ears, feel the kick echoing in his palm and arm and shoulder, and he thinks he might want to find someplace private because there is the distinct possibility that he's going to be violently sick.

"Julien," Dominic murmurs as Lando passes, he feels Dominic's fingers skating along his bloody sleeve.

"Non," he snaps and jerks his arm away, aware that later he'll look into Dominic's wounded eyes and be sorry for his brusqueness, but unable to help it. "Do not touch me, I am all over blood," he says, his voice flat and crisp and icily French. Dominic snatches his hand back as though Lando has slapped it, and the tightening shriek of impending headache becomes actuality.

He should apologize to Dominic, but Lando is beyond certain now that he's going to be sick, and he refuses to do it in the street. He shakes his head once, sharply, a thing that communicates nothing, he knows it, and walks back toward Cate's, forcing himself to walk at a normal pace, with measured strides, and he pushes away the sound of Dominic talking to Sean somewhere behind him.


	11. Comeupance: Lando/Sean/(Dom), Yuma, Early October 1880

Lando isn't sure how it happens; his intentions are always to maintain discretion, to stay away from Dominic during the long evening hours, flirt with the girls, help Cate, play a little poker. He is well aware that a single man can be used against him in a way a house full of whores cannot be, in ways even Cate cannot be, and it's important, imperative that they maintain at least the reasonable appearance of propriety.

But this is the third time this week he's found himself in Dominic's room before the doors closed downstairs.

This particular time, they haven't even bothered to get completely undressed (Lando is aware that the half-formed intention he has of returning belowstairs after is completely ridiculous; once he's here, he never leaves before the very early hours of the morning); Lando's trousers are still clinging precariously to his hips, and Dominic's still wearing his undershirt. Lando has Dominic jammed up against the wall between the foot of the bed and the washstand; occasionally one of Dominic's flailing limbs fetches up against the stand and sets the basin and pitcher to rattling, but so far they've managed not to knock it over. Lando has a mental bet with himself on how long it will take before they do so.

Until such a time as they do, however, he's content to occupy himself with Dominic's overheated mouth, open on Lando's throat, while he thrusts, long and steady and deep, into Dominic's equally overheated arse. If he intends to keep this up for any length of time, they'll have to move to the bed; Lando's fully capable of supporting Dominic's weight (the backs of his thighs pressing, hard and flexing, against Lando's forearms, legs hooked around Lando's waist, the smooth, dense muscles of Dominic's arse flexing in Lando's palms) for a goodly chunk of time, especially with a bit of help from the wall, but when he nears climax, Lando's knees will give (they always do, and it's a new thing, Dominic-centric), and it's best if there's something soft beneath them when that happens.

"We should move," Lando murmurs, and Dominic shifts his face up to smear slick lips across Lando's, muffling half the sentence.

"Nah," he breathes, garbled and indistinct. "Fuck me." Dominic's face is flushed and slack with pleasure. The combination of his slurred, rough voice and his expression sends a rippling, searing brand of heat into Lando's lower belly, and he pushes forward hard enough to make Dominic's eyes go wide and summon a brief, encouraging wail from his throat. "Fuck! Yes, like that," he begs, blatant and unashamed.

Lando bloody loves that, loves Dominic's utter lack of inhibition, his total inability to feel shamed or constrained. "Oui?" Lando asks, smirking, and does it again, rolls his hips forward hard, forearms bunching to pull Dominic forward and down at the same time. "Like this, Dominic?" he murmurs, trying to ignore the clenching pleasure in his balls, block off the awareness of Dominic's earthy scent clinging to his skin, their mingled sweat slicking smooth flesh, the way Dominic's breath stutters, pauses, then resumes with what's almost a snarl.

Dominic makes a sound of agreement that contains far too many consonants; his eyes slip closed and his head falls back to thump dully against the wall, and one of his hands winds itself into Lando's hair, rough and demanding.

"The bed," Lando urges, and Dominic's legs tighten around his waist. Lando's thighs are beginning to bunch and tremble, the big muscles straining and twitching, a sure sign of the impending post-orgasmic collapse. He decides to modifiy his strategy. "On the bed, on your knees," he whispers, and nips at the angle of Dominic's jaw, "for... leverage."

"Yeeeeeeah," Dominic moans, and Lando grins against his cheek, but doesn't waste time chuckling as he turns, taking all of Dominic's weight on his arms, and takes a step toward the bed.

Sean is doing his evening rounds of the drinking joints and grubbier gaming rooms, taming Yuma's wilder tendencies with his presence, exchanging a little idle gossip here and there, noting the new faces in town. DeLaney's saloon is actually one of Sean's personal favorites – small and unpretentious, but clean and usually fairly quiet. Sean goes up to the bar and orders a whiskey.

There's a small group of Sinclair's ranch hands playing cards at a table nearby. They slide wary looks in Sean's direction, which Sean declines to acknowledge. Ever since the whole incident with Julien and Harry and the late George Eades on the porch of the Royale, there's been a change in the atmosphere between Sean and Harry's employees, though whether it's for the better or worse Sean couldn't really say.

"You're out, asshole," one of the players crows to a companion. "What are y' gonna bet? Your boots?"

"Here, how about that," the player being addressed answers, and there's the soft thunk of something solid being palmed down onto the table's scarred wooden top.

Sean glances over without consciously deciding to.

The stake is a small, perfectly plain pocket watch, half-hunter cased in rose gold.

Everything inside Sean stills as he recognizes it.

"Hey, that's pretty. Where'd y' get it?" someone at the table asks.

Sean makes a point of fixing his gaze on the rim of his glass.

The answer comes low-voiced, the speaker all too aware of Sean's presence.

"I won it offa George Eades, before … y' know."

There's a beat of silence around the table. The next remark is even softer, but Sean's always had ears like a fox, and he picks the words out of the general hum of conversation without difficulty.

"An' he got it offa a whore."

There's some stifled smirks around the table.

Sean tosses back the rest of his drink and nods goodnight to the fella behind the bar, and then strolls outside. He glances back just as the doors swing shut behind him, and sees the card players grinning and slapping at each other in amusement now that he's gone.

Sean considers his options for about two seconds, his eyes already narrowing in wicked amusement. He turns left, breaking into a long-legged lope as he covers the half-dozen blocks between DeLaney's and Cate's.

The shift of Julien's thighs as he takes all of Dominic's weight and moves to span the distance to the bed changes the angle of his prick inside Dominic, scrapes against that spot, makes white and black stars bloom across the surfaces of his eyes. He keens, jerks without meaning to, and it sets Julien off-balance, sends them crashing to the bed.

Julien slips out and Dominic groans more from the sudden emptiness than from Julien's weight bearing down on him.

Dominic laughs breathlessly and Julien's bared teeth against Dominic's neck, his treble chuckes shaking his shoulder, makes Dominic belly squirm with lust and a sort of love for him.

Love.

"Need you back in me," Dominic breathes.

"Leverage," Julien growls, and bites hard into Dominic's shoulder.

Dominic shudders and turns onto his belly, pushing his hips back into Julien's, spreading his arse as best he can with one hand, teasing his hole with one finger. "You did promise." Dominic voice is throaty and he can barely understand himself but obviously Julien does because he leans in, nips at one arse cheek and then pulls Dominic back hard, lining up and sliding back in in one smooth motion.

They both sigh. Yes.

It is, oh, it is bloody perfect -- "Mon dieu," he murmurs, a sigh -- a long, torturiously pleasureful glide into heat and constriction, Jesus. Dominic shifts his upper body, levers himself up off the bed to wrap both hands around the roughly carved headboard (ridiculously, Lando feels a flash of concern at the idea of splinters in Dominic's rough and lovely hands), the thick muscles of his upper arms bunching beneath golden skin, the wings of his shoulder blades shifting and realigning, back rippling with movement; Lando is so caught up in how it looks, how unutterably gorgeous Dominic looks with his skin sweat-damp and glowing and the solid muscle and sharp bone moving beneath it, that Dominic's sudden backward push catches him by surprise.

It is a calculated thing, that movement, and Lando knows it, feels it in the sudden tightening down of Dominic's arse around Lando's dick, and though Lando likes to think of himself as a man who doesn't often respond to the calculated, with Dominic it just doesn't matter. Calculated or not, from Dominic, everything is real.

Lando doesn't doubt that Dominic's trade lies mostly in repeat business (though he's taken care not to keep track, not to look at faces and recognize them, he just doesn't want to know), because anyone who spends more than a night or two in his bed has to understand that about him.

Dominic is so real it hurts, it cuts, and Lando has never been so willing to bleed.

He barks out a growl that has elements of a groan, and slams one hand to the headboard beside Dominic's (all thoughts of splinters thoroughly banished), folding himself down along Dominic's spine. Lando's free arm curls around Dominic's slips hips (Lando can feel Dominic's dick bumping up against the back of his forearm) and jerks him back. Dominic breathes out something broken and crackling in Lakota, and Lando answers it in French, lets the words unreel from his lips without censure, things he will never say in English.

"Votre corps, mon Dieu, amour foutu de I la manière que vous vous sentez, comment vous me défaites, Dominic, comment vous me brûlez..." and Dominic's dick smears his arm with slick warmth as Lando flexes it again, pulls back, his hips rolling in urgent counterpoint to Dominic bucking beneath him.

Lando's lips find purchase on the big, quivering tendon in Dominic's neck; Dominic snarls, sounds angry and hurt, but Lando knows better, is intimately familiar with Dominic in the throes of desperate pleasure by now, and the words that batter their way past Dominic's lips only confirm it. "Good, so good, so hard, Julien, yessss..."

Sean bounds up the steps of Cate's house, his coat skirts beating around him.

He strides through the open front door, and into the front parlor. It's a little before ten on a Saturday evening, and there's several knots of men drinking and playing cards, generally with a girl or two hanging over them and tempting them to pleasures with a higher profit margin for the house. Several customers give Sean a wary glance, but the grin twisting his mouth and the sparkle in his eyes reassures them. Sean knocks his hat back off his head, letting it swung from the cord around his throat.

"Sean," Liv says, coming towards him with a smile but a keen edge to her glance that's ready to slide into alarm if the situation warrants it. "Is something wrong?"

"No, I'm just lookin' for Dominic. And, Julien about, is he?"

"Dom went upstairs," Liv says. "I don't know where Julien is, but he's here somewhere, he was playing cards earlier."

"Tah," Sean says, heading towards the stairs.

Liv takes a step after him. Sean is far from a habitué of the house; he is certainly not on the footing of a friend who can come and go as he likes upstairs. But Dom's told Liv enough about what happened when Julien went after Harry Sinclair – both what Dom witnessed first hand and what he heard later third hand from Jude via Ewan – for Liv to feel that perhaps Sean is entitled to a little trust now. So she hangs back, and she doesn't call Cate.

"Which one's Dominic's room?" Sean asks Jewel, who's just opening the door of her own room and ushering a very young looking fella with a red face and a starched collar inside.

"Right there," Jewel says, pointing, her eyes wide with surprise but her brain and body responding to the question before she's even aware of it.

"Tah," Sean grins, hurrying past her and her beau.

This is going to be bloody priceless, Sean thinks. Dominic's smaller than either or Julien, but he's broad boned and wiry, and Sean's seen plenty of his breed who could convincingly kick the arses of men quite a bit bigger and brawnier. Sean's pretty sure Dominic will leap at the chance to retrieve his property himself. And Julien will probably be happy to come along, just to help Sean make sure the odds against Dominic stay half-way fair.

Sean strides to the door Jewel indicated. He raps the knuckles of his left hand on the wood panel, but almost instantly drops his hand to the door handle and turns it, pushing the door open and drawing breath to say "Dominic, come on, some bloody – "

Skin, is the first thing that crosses Sean's mind. There's a lot of bare skin, the low gleam of the single lamp sliding back and forth aover it with the violent motion of their bodies.

And angles, is the next part. Too many angles of bone and muscle, too many harsh hollows deeply shadowed.

Because they're both men.

Dominic vaguely hears the door open and he thinks it's one of the girls, shit, bloody stupid cows-- "Don't stop, don't stop, jesus..."

Julien's hand clamps on Dominic's shoulder and he brings them both back, onto Julien's haunches. "A-Ah!" All Dominic's breath leaves him on a sob, Julien's prick carving deeper than he's ever been and a lovely white-hot dagger of pain spears through Dominic's belly and chest and out his throat.

Julien's voice is a snarl of sound that makes Dominic shudder and he realizes, his heart suddenly strangling him, that Julien is covering Dominic with his whole body, shielding him. "Don't," he whispers, trying to squirm out from behind him, but Julien's hand is tight on his neck, holding him down, his prick spearing him in place. Don't, don't--

"Dom..."

Dominic feels a wave of pins and needles stick him from the inside, gather in his belly and his thighs, all his adrenaline sapping out of him and leaving him shaking and giddy. He can't catch his breath. "Fucking hell, Sean." He stretches and Julien's breath sticks and shudders out. "C'mon," he whispers. Julien's hand slides to fit itself around Dominic's collarbone, and Dominic puts his head back, pushing his hips down so Julien shifts inside him. "God."

Julien pushes back, instinctively and he presses a kiss to Dominic's temple before moving back, stretching Dominic across the headboard. "Come in or go out, Sean; either way close the goddamn door."

Dominic's laughs breaks off into a moan when Julien digs his thumbs into the small of Dominic's back and moves.

Lando realizes after he's already said it that it sounds almost like an invitation, which it most definitely is not. He presses one palm to the small of Dominic's back, pinning him as well as he can (Dominic is a wriggly little bastard), and turns to look at Sean dead on.

Sean blinks. He's standing perfectly still, one hand half-raised (likely interrupted on its way to his hat, to take it off, knock the crease out against his leg or otherwise fiddle with it), and his eyes are wide and slightly glassy, utterly without comprehension.

Lando doesn't think he's ever seen anyone look so absolutely stunned. It's odd, as he hasn't been as careful around Sean as he should have been, he knows it, and he'd rather thought Sean had extrapolated this bit of information some time ago.

"Julien," Dom hisses, trying to push up and back against Lando's restraining hand. When that doesn't work, he grinds himself down against the sheets instead, and his arse goes tight and clenching around Lando's dick.

Lando chokes off a curse and does his best to ignore Dominic writhing and hot and sweaty and blindingly tight beneath him.

"Sean," Lando says, deliberately sharp, and Sean blinks rapidly at him.

"Um," Sean says, and blinks several more times. "I..." And if he didn't get it before, he most certainly does now. The understanding stains his face in a deep, ruddy flush, and if this weren't such an inconvenient bloody time, Lando would be inclined to laugh.

"If this isn't a matter of imminent danger, I'd be grateful if you'd be so kind as to shut the door, Sean," he says instead, as calmly as he can manage.

Shut the door, Sean.

Sean grabs at the words with the alacrity of a drowning man reaching for a lifeline. There's a way out of this, and Sean takes it without further hesitation. He backs up, yanking the door with him so hard that it rattles on its hinges when it slams shut. For a couple of seconds Sean's left blinking at the wooden panels and feeling the blood burning in his face, then Dom's terrible guttural growling drives him further off.

Sean goes to the top of the staircase.

That wasn't … that couldn't have been … it looked like they were … fuck, they were. Is that even possible?

"Jesus," Sean says in disbelief.

"Sean?" Liv says, coming up the stairs with her skirts gathered in one hand and a frown of gentle concern on her face. "Did you find Dominic?"

Sean can only stare at her. Liv darts an anxious glance at the door of Dominic's room. Then her jade blue eyes grow round.

"Oh. Oh. You found Julien too, didn't you?" she asks, her voice and expression all narrowing as she realizes the possible repercussions of this.

"I just – I never – is that – do they – mother o' bleedin' Christ," Sean says so plaintively that Liv can't help biting her lip in amusement and putting her hand on his sleeve. "I mean – why would they - Jesus - why would they even want to do that?"

Liv laughs, but quietly, sympathetically.

"They like it."

"Dominic likes it?" Sean demands, half-appalled and half-appealing.

Liv nods gravely.

Sean tips his head away in a sort of incomplete gesture of negation.

"Bloody hell. I mean, it's one thing for that little gutter shite Elijah to stand for that, but … Dominic's a good lad, y'know? Bloody hell."

Liv waits, pulling her lower lip between her teeth to stifle her grin.

"And Julien," Sean says. "Julien's … he's a good lad too, for a fuckin' Frog. Tougher than he looks. Not fucking afraid of much. Jesus. Jesus."

He shifts, squaring his shoulders and lifting his chin, as if settling into something.

"All right," he says grimly. "Fair enough. I suppose if that's what they … bleedin' hell."

"You need a shot of whiskey," Liv says, taking him by the arm and drawing him downstairs.

"No I don't," Sean says wearily. "I need the whole sodding bottle."

The door shakes in its frame and Julien is still holding Dominic still. "Fuck," Julien bites off and Dominic whines, a growly thing down at the base of his throat, when Julien pulls out, lets just the head of his prick rest at Dominic's arsehole.

"Don't you bloody dare, La Fleur." Dominic squirms over onto his back, gripping the base of Julien's prick so hard Julien grunts a little and his face creases with this brilliant grimace that actually makes Dominic's erection more painful. "Sean's a big boy, and I swear to christ dealing with him will be nothing if you don't-- Ah!"

Julien bares his teeth, spreads his big hands on the insides of Dominic's thighs and pushes them up until they're so tight against Dominic's chest he can barely draw breath.

Dominic moans, his knees pressed against Julien's rib cage, trying to soak the oxygen from Julien's heaving chest. Sweat breaks out on his brow and his upper lip and he fights for air, fights to push down, to get Julien back inside him. Sean can wait, the whole fucking world can wait, it can fall down around them for all he cares.

"Fuck me, I feel like I'm burning up, please..."

When Julien pushes back inside him he feels his orgasm spiral close, quick, drawing all the air, blood, life to the surface of his skin, and everything in him is so still he can hear the blood pumping through his veins.

"Jules, yes, yes..."

Lando, Lando, he wants to snarl, wants to insist, and he bites his tongue so hard he tastes tinny-sweet bloody, and then jams his mouth down onto Dominic's to shut him up, muffle the wrong name stuttering off his lips. Dominic groans desperately, his thighs flexing and bunching against Lando's pinning arms.

"Be still," Lando growls aginst Dominic's lips, and draws back nearly all the way, only to drive back hard and all at once; he has Dominic folded nearly in half, and the position allows him to go, God, so deep. Dominic yells, not a cry or a moan, but a full on shout; it doesn't occur to Lando to stop, as it might have in the beginning.

Dominic can take it, can always take it, and Lando's given up on worrying whether he's been too rough. He suspects maybe there is no 'too rough' for Dominic, and the idea is nearly always enough to drive Lando into a frenzy of lust. He draws back and slams back in; Dominic bloody screams, and Lando feels Dominic's arse clamp down, tight and writhing, pulsing, blood-hot constriction, and Dominic makes a sound like a sob, his hands tangling and pulling in Lando's hair, thighs twitching and hips jerking, strong but hampered by Lando's body weight bearing down on him.

"Ah, God," Dominic whines, guttural and strangled, and Lando barely gets one hand curled around Dominic's dick before he's spurting hard, and uttering a constant, low-pitched moan against Lando's jaw. With Dominic's hot come slick on his hand and chest, Lando is done, he is finished.

His head goes back, teeth clenched and bared, and shudders out his release, hitching for breath and friction and the heat of Dominic's body, his bloody tight and gorgeous body, and he can't think how he will ever get enough of this, how he will ever be able to remove himself from it if it all goes wrong again, as things always somehow do for him.

Sean lets Liv steer him back down the stairs and through to the bar in the back parlor. His lack of resistance both amuses Liv and makes her feel strangely tender towards him. He's only a couple of inches taller than she is, and when he flicks a brief glance in her direction with his chin dropped low, he's looking up at her from under his brows. His dusty-green eyes are uncharacteristically wide and soft. Liv's seen that expression before, and felt this yielding in his limbs. Liv's a whore and has glimpsed many men's souls, but usually under more specific circumstances.

Colin comes towards them, dishcloth in hand, but Liv warns him off with a turn of her head and reaches for the bottle and glass herself.

"Sit down," she says gently to Sean, working the cork out of the bottleneck.

Sean moves a chair at the unoccupied end of the bar, but as he bends to sit some further horror apparently occurs to him.

"Jesus," he says. "Jesus."

Liv stifles the urge to laugh.

"Sean, sit down," she says again, coming to press her hand into the folds of coat and vest and shirt over his chest and guide him down into the seat.

Liv sets the glass down and fills it for him.

"You did know. I mean, you knew Julien and Dominic are together sometimes," she says quietly, passing the glass into Sean's slightly shaking fingers. "Just like Julien and I are together sometimes."

Sean lifts his eyes to her.

"Aye, I mean, he said – he said it was all of youse – he said – but – I didn't – I didn't think - "

Sean gives up, literally speechless.

"Sean. What did you think?" Liv laughs, folding down onto his lap and curling her long soft fingers around his left ear, tucking back a wave of rust-blond hair that's too unruly to stay there for more than a minute. And then, very softly, she asks, "what did you think men do together?"

"I don't know," Sean protests. "I suppose I thought – I thought they might – I don't know," he finishes plaintively. "I don't know what I thought. I don't think I thought anything."

"Drink your whiskey," Liv says, tipping the bottom of the glass towards him with one finger.

While Sean obeys, jerking his head back to throw the spirit down his throat in one go, Liv looks over the top of his head to see Cate standing in the doorway making 'what the hell?' face. Liv rolls her eyes and smiles to indicate that everything's under control, even though the town sheriff is sitting drinking in the back bar with the most expensive girl in the house on his knee. Cate looks dubious, but she nods warily and backs out again.

Dominic loves the hot pulse of Julien inside him, the strain of Julien's body, like he's trying to wring every last bit of himself out, like he can get just that little bit further in. Julien groans incoherently, dropping down, hitching his hips once more, jerkily, and rests his forehead against Dominic's. He's trembling a bit, his muscles still bunched tense.

"Alright, love," Dominic says, his voice gruff. He strokes his hands down Julien's back, down into the cleft of his arse, smoothes his palms soft and firm over the hot skin. He kisses the side of Julien's face, licks at his cheekbone, smiles and scrapes his teeth over the thin fuzz stubbling his jawbone. He smiles because he wants desperately to tell Julien to let Sean go, to let one of the girls handle it, to let Sean maybe fuck his frustration out for once like a normal bloke.

Dominic clenches his arse, and Julien gasps, presses forward again, even as his softening prick shifts and slips out, making Dominic hiss. His thighs ache and as Julien lowers them carefully Dominic groans dramatically, to cover this gaping emptiness that stretches him thin and vulnerable, makes him want to covet this gorgeous man.

"Go on." Dominic strains up to teethe at Julien's lower lip and Julien responds, licking into Dominic's mouth. "Go get him good and drunk," Dominic mumbles, salivating a little at the taste of him, the sharp desire to push him over, take him into his mouth, keep him. He hesitates, wondering if he should offer his services, wondering, for the first time, if maybe he's been holding on too tightly to Julien's coattails.

If Julien asks. In the end, that's what he's here for.

"Go have manly-man talk. Whatever it is you staight blokes do with each other." He grins and smoothes back Julien's hair, tucking it behind one ear.

"Drink, mostly," Lando slurs against Dominic's jaw. "Sing ribald songs, get into fights."

Dominic chuckles quietly, his chest buzzing against Lando's. Lando nuzzles at the crook of Dominic's sweaty neck and just lets himself rest there for a minute, lets himself bask in the feel of Dominic's hands smoothing down the slowly loosening muscles of his back.

"How prosaic," Dominic smirks, and chokes off a laugh as Lando bites reprovingly at the angle of Dominic's collarbone.

"He was looking for you, mon homme," Lando drawls, and, God, he's so bloody tired all the sudden. He'd like nothing better than to ease himself down beside Dominic and drift into the kind of hazy doze that he very occasionally allows himself after, pressed up against Dominic's warmth and swathed in the smell of their sex in the air and on the bedclothes. "Perhaps you should be the one to go have a manly drink. I'll stay here and keep the bed warm."

Dominic snorts. "From the look on his face, I'd lay long odds that Sean wouldn't even be able to look me in the eye right now," he says, and it's mean to be funny -- it is funny, the look on Sean's face had been funny, Lando can't deny it -- but there's a sharpish edge underlying the humor in Dominic's tone, and Lando thinks it bothers him.

Perhaps not much, or perhaps it's something Dominic is used to, but Lando thinks Dominic isn't entirely happy about the idea of facing Sean, having him awkward and uncomfortable. Dominic likes Sean; he is perhaps one of the few men that Dominic counts as a friend, uncomplicated by other things.

"I believe that holds true for both of us," Lando says, and raises one hand -- his arm feels like it ways twenty pounds after holding himself above Dominic for so long -- to brush Dominic's sweaty hair away from his brow and temple. "Best that we go together, I think, and find out what brought him up here, all in a dither. Solidarity, mon ami." He smirks down into Dominic's face.

Dominic smiles back, soft eyes and the slow curve of kiss-darkened lips; Lando resists the urge to lick them open, distract them both from Sean's possible censure with more of what got them into this position in the first place. "I'd set a pretty wager on which of us can make him blush the hardest without actually saying anything suggestive, amour brillant." He arches both brows. "Oui?"

Liv gets another couple of shots of whiskey into Sean, which seems to steady him somewhat, though his expression still flickers between wide-eyed dismay and wincing disbelief with enough rapidity to keep Liv busy stifling her amusement at his expense. Though, in truth, she'll be less pleased if it turns out Julien and Dominic have done lasting damage to Sean's unselfconscious interest in the two young men, and by extension his concern for everyone else in Cate's household. For herself, Liv certainly doesn't care to lose her profitable and pleasant arrangement with Sean. She'll make Julien and Dominic good and sorry if they cost her this liaison.

Liv's more than half considering persuading Sean to come upstairs right now so that she can prove to him – by way of a detailed demonstration – that there are more licit sexual pleasures sweet enough to distract him from the disquieting recollection of Julien and Dominic together. Liv leans against Sean's shoulder as pliantly as her rigid corsetry will allow, and runs her fingers through the unruly waves of his hair.

Sean flicks a glance at her, eyes narrowed enough to score the deep creases in his skin, and lips drawn back a little from his teeth. His breath is warm, acrid with the smell of spirits, and unlaid with the sweet smell of good tobacco. There's a sharp edge to the glint in his gray-green eyes that makes Liv's mouth curl in satisfaction, but he catches hold of her wrist when she slides her hand up between the folds of his coat and jacket.

"Not jus' now, pet," he murmurs.

Liv frowns, and shifts her weight in his lap, pressing herself into his groin.

"What are you going to do?" she asks in an impatient undertone. "Never fuck me again because you saw Julien and Dominic - "

"Jesus, don't bleedin' say it," Sean hisses, the blood coming up in his cheeks again.

"You still want me," Liv says hastily, twisting her hand free and sliding her fingers into the heated space between the rucked silk of her dress and the rough wool of Sean's pants. "Don't worry, I can make you want me, Sean."

"Bleedin' hell," Sean yelps, as Liv's long fingers curl around the curve of his cock through his clothing.

Liv flicks her tongue against the crimson rim of his right ear.

Sean snorts and tries to baffle her hand without just pressing it harder against himself.

"Unhand me, you witch," he laughs.

It's at that precise moment, with his blood starting to pool heavy and hot between his legs, with Liv wriggling like a satiny snake in his lap and her tongue darting wetly into his ear, that Sean looks up and sees Julien and (a step or two behind him) Dominic coming down the stairs. They're both fully dressed (Julien in his peacock finery, Dominic as always dressed no better than a clean ranch hand) and Julien has made some passing attempt at smoothing his curls. But they're both flushed, dark-mouthed and heavy-eyed, loose-limbed and languid.

Sean feels himself flush hotly. He's not sure what's more embarrassing right now: that Julien and Dominic … do that, that Sean saw them doing it, or that it never occurred to him before that it was even doable.

Dominic shifts from foot to foot, balancing on the balls of his feet, stuck on the second stair as Julien steps down, nodding at Sean.

I can't he thinks, I can't.

Julien looks back at him, raising one eyebrow, his thin, elegant mouth curling questioningly.

Dominic smiles back, tightly, and now Julien frowns, because he must see the self-loathing that's rising in Dominic's throat and making the muscle in his cheek jump. He trusts Julien, he does, where he's stopped trusting just about everyone else, but he can't see that look on his face, that shame and revulsion and apology that some of his tricks get in the light of day, caught out with a queer whore.

Sean is looking at him, too, and there's a mixture of all three of those emotions on the Sherriff's face. Dominic feels a rushing of his blood between his ears, making his scalp prickle with anxiety. He twists his hands in his belt loops, tugging the silver ring on his thumb so it cuts into his palm.

Julien is still looking at him, patiently, solemnly.

Dominic takes a deep breath and steps next to him, nodding curtly, setting his jaw and raising his chin because he's not ashamed of who he is. And if Sean is the man Dominic thinks he is, he'll be okay.

And Julien. Julien winks at him and Dominic feels that giddy sweep of adrenaline again. Julien is the man Dominic knows he is.

"Sorry to keep you waiting," Dominic says at last, trying to soften his grin. "But Julien, well, the women aren't the only ones round here who need some time to get themselves presentable."

Lando arches his brows and looks faintly perplexed, gesturing languidly toward Dominic with one hand, but keeping Sean's gaze. "Ignore him, mon homme," he drawls. "It is the heat, oui? His constitution is unsuited for it. Exertion of any sort tires him so."

Dominic makes an affronted sound that doesn't entirely conceal his amusement, and Lando lays a hand on his arm to quiet him. "Hush, Dominique, do not tire yourself," he says, voice laced with faux concern. Dominic snorts and jerks his arm out from under Lando's hand, rolling his eyes.

"Daft bastard," he grumbles, but his cheeks and ears are warmly pink they way they always are when he's pleased and happy, which make's Lando's lips curl into a more genuine smile. Dominic returns it, his eyes bright and wide open with pleasure, and Lando has to drag his attention away, lest he succumb to the urge to postpone this conversation with Sean indefinitely.

"My apologies, Sheriff, for keeping you waiting," he says, absolutely ignoring Sean's uncertain stare and behaving as though everything were exactly as it had been an hour ago. He has no intention of embarassing Sean (at least not any more than they already have), in spite of his suggestion to Dominic, and he's sure Dominic is aware of that as well.

Or, at least not about that.

He tips his head in Liv's direction -- she's giving him a look, the sort than can only mean she intends to corner him later and give him a piece of her mind, at which point Lando will be happy to point out that it wasn't as though he and Dominic were shagging in the hall -- and purses his lips, letting his gaze fall pointedly toward Sean's belly, where he can see Liv's wrist wedged between their bodies in a distinctly unseemly fashion. "Though it seems your time was well occupied," he smirks.

Sean's already about as uncomfortable as he can get, so it's less of an annoyance than it could be when he has to grip Liv's slender wrist and bodily remove her hand from between them. Liv doesn't seem particularly put out by this rebuff. She clasps her hands in her lap and turns a little on Sean's knee so that she's facing slightly more away from him and slightly more towards Lando and Dom, and leans back until she's resting against Sean's shoulder. He's obliged to put his hand on her waist to keep her weight braced, and in truth there's something reassuring about the unyielding curve of whalebones and taut silk under his fingers. This he understands.

Julien and Dominic – that, he doesn't understand. At all.

There's plenty about Julien that's almost womanish, his airs and his clothes and the way he seems perfectly at ease sprawled on a couch half-buried under the skirts and frills of a couple of Cate's girls on either side of him, tugging their ribbons and talking nonsense with them as if it were the most natural thing in the world. But Sean's lived in close enough proximity to gentry not to confuse lordly manners or fine clothes with weakness.

There's a razor edge to Julien's eyes, and a habitual tension around the corners of his narrow lips, that Sean knows all too well. It greets him every morning when he shaves in front of the little wood-framed mirror hanging over his washstand. And if Sean ever had any doubts before, he'd have lost them standing on the porch of the Royale.

And Dominic. Sean's seen glimpses of Dominic's quiet capability, the way he handles horses and hard work and the drunken customers Sean very occasionally has to haul off Cate's front steps. Dominic's enough like Sean's own tribe for Sean to feel a shadow of protective pride over the young man's scrappy, light-headed nature. Dominic will go toe-to-toe with men twice his size and –

Eades, and Reedus, and Cushing, and Blake

\- Sean can feel the blood burning in his face with renewed ferocity. He'd known – or at least, he'd had a fairly clear idea – what Eades's argument with Dominic had been. But suddenly Sean's forced to confront the actuality of it. Dominic took that inhuman beating for  


Sean's already about as uncomfortable as he can get, so it's less of an annoyance than it could be when he has to grip Liv's slender wrist and bodily remove her hand from between them. Liv doesn't seem particularly put out by this rebuff. She clasps her hands in her lap and turns a little on Sean's knee so that she's facing slightly more away from him and slightly more towards Lando and Dom, and leans back until she's resting against Sean's shoulder. He's obliged to put his hand on her waist to keep her weight braced, and in truth there's something reassuring about the unyielding curve of whalebones and taut silk under his fingers. This he understands.

Julien and Dominic – that, he doesn't understand. At all.

There's plenty about Julien that's almost womanish, his airs and his clothes and the way he seems perfectly at ease sprawled on a couch half-buried under the skirts and frills of a couple of Cate's girls on either side of him, tugging their ribbons and talking nonsense with them as if it were the most natural thing in the world. But Sean's lived in close enough proximity to gentry not to confuse lordly manners or fine clothes with weakness.

There's a razor edge to Julien's eyes, and a habitual tension around the corners of his narrow lips, that Sean knows all too well. It greets him every morning when he shaves in front of the little wood-framed mirror hanging over his washstand. And if Sean ever had any doubts before, he'd have lost them standing on the porch of the Royale.

And Dominic. Sean's seen glimpses of Dominic's quiet capability, the way he handles horses and hard work and the drunken customers Sean very occasionally has to haul off Cate's front steps. Dominic's enough like Sean's own tribe for Sean to feel a shadow of protective pride over the young man's scrappy, light-hearted nature. Dominic will go toe-to-toe with men twice his size and –

 _Eades, and Reedus, and Cushing, and Blake_

\- Sean can feel the blood burning in his face with renewed ferocity. He'd known – or at least, he'd had a fairly clear idea – what Eades's argument with Dominic had been. But suddenly Sean's forced to confront the actuality of it. Dominic took that inhuman beating for , for coming down the stairs flushed and dark-eyed, his spine a little too fluid and his head tilted a little too high. He took that beating for _Julien_ , because he wants _Julien_.

Sean can feel a cold fire of fury sweeping through him, tightening his mouth and narrowing his eyes. There's not one of Sinclair's punks that's fit to clean Dominic Monaghan's boots, nor Julien La Fleur's either, regardless of how the fuck they like to comport themselves in bed.

"There's four of Sinclair's cow-punchers playing poker in DeLaney's front room. Tom Blake's older brother, I didn't recognize the others. They've got your half-hunter," Sean says to Dominic. "I thought you pair o' shit-kickers might find it more amusing to take it back yerselves than have me bring to yeh."

"My--" Dominic takes a half-step forward and stops. "You came to tell me that."

Sean nods and clears his throat. "'Course."

Dominic's not one to hold pride above all else, but he does have a fair amount of it. And Sean could have brought it back to him wrapped up nice and neat, but instead he trusted him enough to be able to go get it back for himself.

Dominic feels a huge grin stretching his face. "That's fucking brilliant, that is." He wishes he could throw his arms about Sean and bear-hug the shite out of him, but he thinks maybe a handshake might be enough, and he grabs his free palm, squeezes it hard and slaps him on the back.

Seans clears his throat again and looks over Dominic's shoulder at Julien. "You're fair fucking brilliant," Dominic stresses and he hopes Sean understands because Dominic can make the big womanly speech and that's all right with him, but Sean did this for him and he wants to do something for Sean, too, smooth it over without fuss, make it right.

"You wanted shit-kickers?" Dominic asks, grinning with all his teeth, and he turns to look at Julien, "then let's go kick some shit."

Dominic is looking at Lando, or else he would see the absolute delight on Sean's face which Lando thinks would go a long way toward easing Dominic's mind. Though honestly, Sean had done that already, just by still being here when they came down, just by being willing to look Dominic in the eye and talk to him as an equal.

He flickers his gaze to Liv for a moment -- she looks unmistakably relieved -- and flickers a barely-there wink in her direction.

"Mon dieu, but you English are bloodthirsty," he says, and arches a brow, gaze going to Sean for a moment, then to Dominic. They both grin, and then Sean laughs, open and hearty and far less uncomfortable than Lando really has any right to expect, and shifts Liv (with great care, Lando notes) off of his lap and stands up. Lando straightens his coat, flicking open a button, and then tugs exageratedly at his cuffs. "Well, if we must" he sighs, but he isn't even trying to fool them, and their twin grins say that's a good thing, as they most certainly aren't fooled.

Dominic lets out a little whooping growl, and heads of the door, and Lando and Sean follow.

DeLaney's is the first saloon in Yuma that Lando had ever played cards in.

From all appearances, it hasn't changed much in the past few years. It's still dirty, smokey, loud, and home to the rowdier elements. It's a place Rueben would feel right at home, and Julien had only played one round there before moving to a more suitable environment. Back then, Julien had still been relatively new; if he were to arrive in Yuma now, Julien wouldn't have considered even stepping foot into DeLaney's.

Be that as it may, Lando thinks he's likely to do a hell of a lot more than step foot in tonight, and if he's lucky, he won't end up flying out and landing on his arse. He grins faintly at the thought.

He considers it unlikely, at best.

"Me first," Dom snarls as the three of them, with Lando in the middle, take the three stairs up to the boardwalk.

"Be my guest," Lando agrees, and Sean dips his head in a nod, a motion that Lando only sees from the corner of his eye. "Shall we wait until you've got them foaming at the mouth, mon homme?" he teases, and Dominic tilts his head slightly, a peculiar Dom-ism that speaks volumes, translates in Lando's chest and belly as both agreement and amusement, along with hints of mockery. He smiles and Dominic... goes warm. Lando isn't even sure how to desribe it better than that. His eyes and face and smile go warm and welcoming, like coming home after the worst day imaginable, and his body turns toward Lando slightly, a thing Lando doesn't think he's even aware of.

"You just be ready," Dominic whispers, and Lando feels fingertips skate along the back of his hand for a moment. Then he straightens and turns, vanishing into the saloon with three quick, confident steps.

Lando, tense now, and waiting, turns to Sean, wanting to thank him, totally aware that there is no way to do so, really. He smiles instead, all teeth, but maybe the most honest expression he's ever given Sean, and nods instead.

Dominic pushes open the swinging doors and his eyes take a moment to adjust to the yellowing, smoky light inside, his ears to the odd mix of too-quiet and the low din of laughter and coins rattling and the grind of the spinnet. In the second it takes, he thinks of standing behind the table until one of them looks up, he thinks of clapping a hand on one of the wankers' meaty shoulder, of smiling pleasantly and asking him to step outside.

He does stand close but in the end, he doesn't wait. He sees his Da's watch and he knows he's got two good men outside, expecting the worst, and Dominic's not one to waste an opportunity.

"Gentlemen," he announces, and he does, indeed, bring his hand down one one wide, hard shoulder, and the din all melds into the unearthly, too-loud quiet. "Thassa fancy watch you got there, mate."

The bloke half-stands, jerking away from Dominic's grip. "And who the fuck are you?"

"Whore," one of the men coughs into his fist, and the others titter like schoolgirls.

Dominic smiles tightly, but he feels bile rise in his throat. "Whore and owner of that fancy watch there."

"After this round, son, I think I'll be the owner of that fancy watch there." The bloke stands, towering over him, grinning.

Dominic nods. "Right, if we're gonna do it that way." He swings, hard, and the guy's head snaps to one side. Dominic's knuckles explode with pain but he grins, shaking it out. Can picture the fond exasperation on Julien's face when he hears Dominic threw the first punch.

The bloke looks back at him, rubbing his jaw, a thin line of blood trickling over his split lip. "Eades told me you like it rough."

Adrenaline tingles in Dominic's thighs and biceps. "You have no idea," he says, and licks his lips deliberately.

The punch, when it comes, actually knocks him down, spins him and lays him flat across a table full of older women, made up in their tatty day dresses. "Ladies," he says, licking blood from his chin and poking at his teeth with his tongue, as they leap from the table, two of them picking up their skirts and running for the door.

He pushes himself up, turns to find four big men standing, waiting for him.

And there is a moment where he freezes, can't move, can't speak, feels his heart beating in his throat, strangling him. He remembers, more than anything, the icy fear of being helpless, pushed against a brick wall, his trousers yanked down and hot, greasy breath on his face.

They're speaking to him, closer now, and he can't hear anything through the cotton in his ears. He takes a breath, and forces himself up; and once he's up, he can't stop, propelling himself into the first man he sees, head first, swinging for all he's worth.

Sean and Julien each take a smart step back from the doorway as a couple of blowsy looking women in cotton dresses and turkey feather boas barge out.

"Madames," Julien smirks.

"Evening, ladies," Sean grins, though his sparkling look is thrown to Julien, not the women.

Somehow, the levity with which Sean and Julien are treating the situation has become a silent discourse of acceptance and reassurance between the two of them. Whatever Dominic lets Julien do to him – Sean feels the warm prickle of blood in his face yet again and wonders if he'll ever become immune to that reaction – Dominic's man enough for Sean to let him walk into a four-on-one fistfight. And Julien apparently feels the same.

There's a heavy crash of wooden furniture being overturned and a thinner smash of glass.

"Should we go in, d'yeh think?" Sean asks mildly.

Julien lifts his eyebrows in feigned exasperation.

"It would be inconvenient if he actually kills one of them," he shrugs. "Cate does so dislike that kind of scandal."

"Right so," Sean says, tipping his hat back off his head and letting it swing from the cord around his throat.

He pushes through the door, Julien slightly behind and to the right of him.

They're half way across the room before they locate Dominic on the far side of the large round table that's now knocked over onto the floor. Dominic's got one of his opponents down, knee in his chest and fist making bloody meat of his face. Another man is on the sidelines, bent double with both hands cradled around one eye.

Jonathan Blake grabs Dominic by the back of his clothes and bodily lifts him off the fella on the floor. Dominic spits and kicks, more in frustration than any coordinated attempt at escape. Blake makes the mistake of glancing over at Sean and Julien, though, and he hesitates as his mouth drops open in dismay. Dominic takes advantage of that momentary lapse to get his feet on the floor again, and drives his right elbow back solidly into Blake's ribs. Blake doubles, hacking out his breath, and Dominic twists out of his grip and uses the momentum of the turn to snap a right-fisted uppercut across Blake's chin.

The fourth man, who's been hedging on the edges of the fight, insufficiently reassured by odds of four-to-one, takes absolute fright at the prospect of four-to-three, and skirts hurriedly around the other tables, trying to come at the door from behind Sean and Julien. Sean folds his arms and leans back a little, nailing the escapee with an arch look. Julien has seen him too, and he's closer to the door than Sean.

It would take little to no effort to take out the coward creeping around the edge of the room, but Lando decides against it. In point of fact, he feels like it's something like necessary for Dominic to be doing just about precisely what he's doing at the moment -- that is to say, to face the same kind of odds he'd face against Eades and his friends -- and to do it pretty much unaided.

There are some things a man doesn't get over -- God knows Lando knows about that -- and he hates the idea that the beating from Eades might be one of those things for Dominic. Lando knows how to read a man, and he's had ample time to watch Dominic since then. He doesn't think Dominic is afraid, precisely, but there's a kind of hitch in his behavior, a subtle hesitation that, in most situations, probably wouldn't matter one way or another, but could, in some, be dangerous.

Dominic, whether he knows it or not, reads people, too. He reads people every time he takes a man upstairs to his room, and Lando has great respect for Dominic's ability to make good choices in that regard. Hesitation of the kind he's seen on Dominic's face recently is the same kind of thing that makes a man careless. He gets used to being suspicious, and dismisses his instincts when they tell him he's got reason.

If it goes on, the next time Lando comes to Yuma to find Cate waiting on the porch outside for him, it might be even worse.

Better to let Dominic handle as much of this as he can, and do just enough to keep it reasonable.

So instead of removing the man from the brawl, Lando merely steps to the side, covering the door, and flips open his coat. "You aren't going anywhere, mon ami," he says pleasantly, but with as much steel as he knows how to put into his voice, which is considerable, if he does say so himself.

The bloke flinches back, hesitant, and actually throws a look at Sean, as though for help.

"Finish what you've started, or I'll throw you bodily back into the melee," Lando says, and hears Sean muffle a snort of laughter.

The bloke turns back toward his compadres just as Dominic lands a brilliant hook to a bloke with one eye already swollen completely shut; the bugger goes down like he was kicked by a mule, still and bleeding. Lando resists the urge to cheer, and Sean plants a foot in the still hesitant coward's backside and shoves him bodily into the fray.

Lando barks out a laugh at the almost sublime look of satisfaction on Sean's face when Dominic immediately jumps on the bloke and bloodies his nose.

The warm spatter of blood on his knuckles actually makes Dominic's belly drop like it does when Julien looks at him a certain way. He's hard in his denims, so hard it's painful and punches the wanker again, following him as he goes down, straddling him and grinding his prick against the bloke's belt buckle. Pain and victory and all blend together, and he can't stop hitting him, again, again, until his knuckles split, until the bloke's face is slack, drooling, defeated.

He's half out of his mind. He recgonizes it, at least, and he reckons that's better than being off his nut and thinking he's completely sane.

Someone gets him under his arms, drags him off, kicking and hissing, and the blow to the stomach takes him by surprise, sends him down hard.

Julien is there, Sean is there, and Dominic takes the punch, takes another, a bubble of hysteria floating in his belly, up into his chest. He headbutts his assailant -- maybe one of the cunts who was there that night -- and the bloke goes limp, pinning Dominic under his heavy body.

Dominic laughs, shoves as hard as he can to free himself and struggle to his knees. It's been awhile since he was in a real brawl, since he felt free enough to take the hits, to be a little reckless. And it feels fucking fantastic.

Julien is there, holding out a strong, brown hand. Dominic almost drags him down in his struggle to pull himself up, and he laughs until tears gloss his vision; when they're upright, Dominic leans in close, bites Julien's jaw hard under the guise of getting his feet under him.

"Later," he breathes, and feels a thrill at doing this in public, at the smell of blood and sweat and triumph and he's breathing so hard he thinks he may pass out. "Later. I'm gonna suck you off so hard you'll feel like I pulled your fucking belly out your prick."

Over Julien's shoulder he see the Sheriff shove a bloke down, wiping disgustedly at the blood spattered on his denims.

Dominic catches his eye, winks, smiles, no, fucking beams, and realizes he has no idea how to thank him. He shrugs expansively and Sean smiles back, slowly.

Lando laughs, low and smoky, a hybrid of Lando and Julien, the sort of thing he can't quite help showing Dominic in spite of the danger. He steadies Dominic carefully before taking a step back, feeling the familiar shudder deep in his belly at the way Dominic regards him, the filthy aligned so flawlessly with the pristine, and for a moment he is nearly overwhelmed by something like vertigo, just looking at Dominic bloody and laughing like a madman.

Oh, imbécile, he thinks, and he nearly can't breathe. How could I be so stupid? Because he knows. He knows. And perhaps Cate has always known, and that's why she has never, in all these years, she has never looked at him like Dominic looks at him, she has never said with all she is and all she has (without ever saying it) that she loves him. And in the face of that -- it's all over Dominic's face, it is in the lines of his body, it is in the words he speaks, though he has never spoken the words -- Lando feels... lacking.

He does not deserve that look on Dominic's face, a thing he has accomplished through guile and lies, and he should not take what he doesn't deserve. He shouldn't.

He turns away -- he doesn't miss the way Dominic's grin wilts, or the way his own belly clenches unhappily in response -- casting about for an excuse to gather himself, and sees the gleam of Dominic's watch, still on the table. He strides to it and sweeps it off the table, disdaining to bother with the rest of the meager odds and ends the bastards had been playing with. It's is smooth and bright, undulled by age, something obviously well-loved, cared for, treasured. He closes his hand around it for a moment, feeling cool, smooth metal against his palm, and feels his composure slip slowly, reluctantly into place.

He turns and holds the pocketwatch up, dancing it idly over the backs of his knuckles. Dominic's eyes brighten and gleam, his grin returning full-force.

"Well, mon homme," Lando says, Julien thick in his voice and shadowy in his mind, and flips the watch into Dominic's waiting hand. "You've left little for us to do, I see." He sniffs, and casts his eyes at the bodies on the ground. They are all out cold, or wise enough to pretend to be. "How selfish of you."

Dominic coyly looks down at the watch, his watch, and back up, sweeping his lashes over his cheeks and grinning. Julien needs this, he knows. He needs to retreat, he needs for Dominic to accept, even if he doesn't really understand.

He needs Dominic to not ask. And Dominic never does. No matter how much he wants to. No matter that sometimes, he wants to heave a sigh and punch him right in his pretty face.

"I am supremely selfish, mon ami." His french accent is atrocious, deliberately so, even though he could imitate Julien so well he's sure his own mother wouldn't be able to tell them apart. But it makes Julien smile, that little wry curl to his lip that Dominic prizes. "It's part of my charm."

He holds up his watch. "And now I'm bored of this place."

"Oui," Lando agrees, nodding and relieved that Dom doesn't seem inclined to push him. Though honestly, with the notable exception of sex, Dominic never pushes him.

He turns to Sean, and isn't surprised at all to find him watching Lando, watching them, with a kind of uncomfortable speculation that would actually be amusing if it weren't for the way Sean is crunching the brim of his beloved hat in both hands. He supposes it's only natural that Sean be unsettled, and it seems a kindness to let Sean go work the situation out in his own mind and come to grips with it. No need to drag it out any longer; he's made enough of a gesture for Lando to be sure enough he'll eventually get past it.

Sean doesn't attempt to avoid his eyes when Lando meets his gaze, and Lando gives him a nod. Sean nods back, eyes shadowed, and Lando chooses to ignore the fierce crease between his brows. Nothing to be done there; time would tell. Sean gives Dominic the same nod, and perhaps that is enough.

"Oui, Dominic," Lando repeats, and turns toward the door, stepping carefully over an unconcious bloke in his path. He's very aware of the rest of the patrons of the saloon watching warily. "Shall we?" He gestures toward the double doors with a flourish and a diffident little bow.

"We shall," Dominic bows back, looking down and away from all the eyeing-up. He's tired, he realizes. It feels like all the blood is leaving his limbs and all his muscles move like they're made of lead. He is, in fact, exhausted.

Julien is watching him with that same smile on his face.

He is tired, but, like Sean, it's something that only time will heal.

Dominic smiles back, and pushes through the saloon doors and out into the dull bronze of the setting sun.


End file.
